



^^'-n^. 



v' /y^ 







<^ fj^ - 

■<y r\^ o " o _ *0-» 



A' 




P!^^'^. ••%...-.,. 



^°^<*., 




4 O 

_ ^ ■<<v 




o > 



4 o 






"^5* A. 

• ♦ * A ' 



^ ^^% ^¥^^ 






^ 



'vt-O^ 



o 



^ •: ^ '/ ^'-^ 'm^' ^'\. -.^p:^^ 






o 
o 






o • * ' .0 



>o 



' . . s 



« ^ 



-^^ "■ ^^ 



^- 



^.^.%^^^ 



^>.' 



.? • ^ V^. 






■^ 



.0' 



•^^0^ 




yy /y- 




^^0^ 





sP 



^-y 






^^ ^^^ 



^ 



v^ 




,y^'^- 



.0 



1W>j^ • ^ A^ ^/'. ,^ ^ „ -^ ^ 




c^ 



'^0' 




>.°-;^. 




^^0^ 










^M-/ >' 



'^O' 



yi¥: ^'X V 



,<;■ 



.^ 



^-£-' 






\^ 



u 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 



BY THE SAME A UTHOR 

THE PATIENT OBSERVER 

THROUGH THE OUTLOOKING GLASS 

POST IMPRESSIONS 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 



OR 



VILLAGE LIFE IN 
NEW YORK CITY 



BY 

SIMEON STRUNSKY 



J^H^ 


^^ 


M 


[fl^ 


i^t 




w^ 


^ 


^^ 




ts? 


w 


5^ 



NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1914 



F/ZS 



Copyright, 1914, 

BY 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 



Published October, 1914 



Portions of this volume were copyrighted 
separately aa follows : 

In Belshazzar Cour*, copyright, 1913, by 
The Atlantic Monthly Company. 

The Street, The Show, The Game, and 
School, copyright, 1914, by The Atlantic 
Monthly Company. 

Night Life, copyright, 1914, by Harper and 
Brothers. 



NOl/ 23 1914 



THE QUINN a BODEH CO. PNEtS 

RAHWAY, N. J. 



// £i' 



CI.A388513 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PACK 

I. In Belshazzar Court S 

II. The Street 28 

III. The Show 50 

IV. The Game 73 

V. Night Life 98 

VI. Laurelmere in Peace and War . 117 

VII. School 146 

VIII. Harold and the Universe . . . 169 



BELSHAZZAR COURT 



], (I n ; r)i!t !l 




IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Our apartment house has all-night elevator 
service. We have grown accustomed to being 
awakened in the middle of the night by the sound 
of violent hammering on the iron door of the ele- 
vator shaft, the object of which is to attract the 
attention of the operator, who is in the habit of 
running up his car to the top floor and going to 
sleep in the hall, being roused only with the great- 
est difficulty. Tenants have complained of the 
inconvenience ; especially when one comes home 
late from an after-theater supper at a Broadway 
hotel. In deference to such complaints our ele- 
vator boys are constantly being discharged, but 
the tradition of going to sleep on the top floor 
seems to be continuous. 

One of the reasons for this, I imagine, is that 
our landlord underpays his help and is conse- 
quently in no position to enforce discipline. How- 
ever, I speak almost entirely on information and 
belief, my personal experience with the all-night 

3 



4 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

elevator having been confined to a single instance. 
That was when we came back from our vacation 
last summer at an early hour in the morning and 
rang the bell without eliciting any response. In- 
asmuch as we live only two flights up, we walked 
up the stairs, I carrying a suit-case, a hand-bag 
and the baby, and Emmeline carrying another 
suit-case and leading by the hand our boy Harold, 
who was fast asleep. 

During the day our elevator is frequently 
out of order. The trouble, I believe, is with the 
brake, which every little while fails to catch, so 
that the car slides down a floor or two and sticks. 
It is quite probable that if our elevator boys re- 
mained long enough to become acquainted with 
the peculiar characteristics of the machinery in 
Belshazzar Court such stoppages would come less 
often. But no serious accidents have ever oc- 
curred, to my knowledge, and personally, as I 
have said, I suff'er little inconvenience, since it is 
no trouble at all to walk up two flights of stairs. 

But it is different with Emmeline, who worries 
over the children. She will not allow the baby to 
be taken into the car. Instead, she makes the 
nurse ride up or down with the go-cart, and 
has her fetch the baby by the stairs. Em- 
meline complains that in cold weather this 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 5 

necessitates her own going downstairs to tuck the 
child into her cart, a duty which cannot possibly 
be delegated. It also exposes the baby to 
draughts v/hile she is being taken out of the cart 
in the hall, preparatory to being carried upstairs. 
But Emmeline would rather take that chance than 
have the elevator drop with baby, as happened 
twice during the first week after we moved in. I 
have sometimes argued with her on the subject, 
maintaining that there cannot be any real danger 
when the safety of the elevator is guaranteed by 
no less than three casualty companies ; but Em- 
meline says that is a detached point of view which 
she cannot share. Our boy Harold is under strict 
injunctions to walk. He finds it a deprivation, 
after having twice tasted the joy of being 
marooned between floors, whence he was rescued 
by means of a ladder. 

It is on account of the large bedrooms that we 
selected this particular apartment house and cling 
to it in spite of certain obvious disadvantages. 
That is, there is really one bedroom only which 
can be called very large, but it has a fair amount 
of sunlight and it faces on an open court. Harold 
has the music-room, which landlords formerly 
used to call the back parlor. It faces on the 
avenue and makes an excellent sleeping-room and 



6 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

play-room for the boy. Such rooms are almost 
impossible to find in a tolerable neighborhood for 
the really moderate rent we pay. That is, my rent 
is just a little more than I can afford; neverthe- 
less you would think it reasonable if you saw what 
a fine appearance our apartment house makes. It 
has a fa9ade in Flemish brick, with bay windows 
belted by handsome railings of wrought iron upon 
narrow stone balconies. It also has a mansard 
cornice painted a dull green, which is visible sev- 
eral blocks away over the roofs of the old-fash- 
ioned flats by which our house is surrounded. 

Our friends, when they come to see us for the 
first time, are impressed with Belshazzar Court. 
You pass through heavy grilled doors into a 
marble-lined vestibule which is separated by a 
second pair of massive doors from the spacious 
main hall. This hall is gay with an astonishingly 
large number of handsome electroliers in imita- 
tion cut glass. There is also a magnificent marble 
fireplace in which the effect of a wood fire is 
simulated by electric bulbs under a sheet of red- 
colored isinglass. The heat is furnished by a 
steam radiator close by. The floor has two large 
Oriental rugs of domestic manufacture. There is 
a big leather couch in front of the fireplace. 
Everywhere are large, comfortable, arm-chairs in 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 7 

which I have often thought it would be pleasant 
to lounge and smoke, but I have never had the 
time. On a mahogany table, in the center, the 
day's mail is displayed. I have sometimes glanced 
over the letters in idle curiosity and found that 
they consist largely of circulars from clothing 
firms and dyeing establishments. The chandeliers 
usually have a number of the crystal prisms 
broken or missing. The rugs are fairly worn, but 
doubtless the casual visitor does not notice that. 
The general effect of our main hall is, as I have 
said, imposing. Sunday afternoons there are 
several motor-cars lined up in front of the house. 
The number of young children in our apart- 
ment house is not large, a dozen or fifteen, per- 
haps. The house has six stories and there are 
nine apartments to the floor, so you can figure out 
for yourself the rate of increase for the popula- 
tion of Belshazzar Court. My own contribution 
to the infant statistics of our apartment house 
is apparentl}'^ between one-sixth and one-eighth of 
the total number. Moreover, if you calculate not 
by mere number but by the amount of vital energy 
liberated, my own share is still larger. For there 
is no denying the justice of the hall boys' com- 
plaint that our Harold creates more disturbance 
in the house than any other three children. The 



8 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

missing prisms in the hall chandeliers are in con- 
siderable degree to be attributed to Harold. Not 
that he has a predilection for electroliers. He is 
just as hard on shoes and stockings. The former 
he destroys in a peculiar manner. As he walks 
upstairs, he carefully adjusts the upper of his 
shoe, just over the arch, to the edge of each step, 
and scrapes toward the toe slowly but firmly. 
When in good form he can shave the toes from a 
new pair of shoes in a single afternoon, and I 
have known him to reduce his footgear, within a 
week, to a semblance of degraded destitution that 
is the despair and mortification of his mother. 

However, it must not be supposed that Harold 
is unpopular with the working staff of Belshazzar 
Court. The only apparent exception is the house 
superintendent, who is held responsible for all 
damage accruing to halls and stairways. His 
point of view is therefore quite comprehensible. 
But even the bitter protests of the house superin- 
tendent are not, I imagine, a true index to his 
permanent state of feeling with regard to Harold. 
At least I know that after the superintendent has 
called up Emmeline on the telephone to complain 
of Harold's fondness for tracing patterns on the 
mahogany hall table with a wire nail, the boy has 
been found in the cellar watching the stoking of 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 9 

the furnace with bated breath, a privilege con- 
ferred on but few. The superintendent has also 
given Harold the run of a great pile of cinders 
and ashes which occasionally accumulates near 
the furnace doors. From such excursions the 
boy returns with the knees of his stockings en- 
tirely gone, and only the blue of his eyes discern- 
ible through a layer of coal dust which lends him 
an aspect of extraordinary ferocity. 

And yet I believe it is Harold's clamorous 
career through life that is the secret of his popu- 
larity with the people in our house. When he 
walks down the stairs it sounds like a catastrophe. 
He engages in furious wrestling bouts with the 
hall boys, whose life he threatens to take in the 
most fiendishly cruel manner. His ability to 
" lick " the elevator boy and the telephone 
operator single-handed is an open secret to any- 
one who has ever met Harold. But as I have said, 
there are very few children in the house, and I 
imagine that the sound of him engaging in mortal 
combat with the elevator boy and the clatter of 
his progress down the stairs echo rather grate- 
fully at times through the long, somber hall- 
ways. 

I am an eyewitness of Harold's popularity on 
Sunday mornings when Emmeline and I, with both 



10 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the children, ride down in the elevator for our 
weekly stroll along the Boulevard. My bodily 
presence on Sunday so far removes my wife's ap- 
prehensions with regard to the elevator that she 
will consent to take the baby down in the car. On 
such occasions I have observed that our neighbors 
invariably smile at Harold. Sometimes they will 
ask him how soon and in just what way he in- 
tends to destroy the new hall boy, or they will 
reach out a hand and pluck at his ear. The 
women in the car content themselves with smiling 
at him. 

Harold's friends, who thus salute him on Sun- 
day morning, usually carry or lead a small dog 
or two which they are taking out for the daily 
exercise. There are a large number of small dogs 
in our apartment house. I don't pretend to know 
the different breeds, but they are nearly all of 
them winsome little beasts, with long, silky pelts, 
retrousse noses, and eyes that blink fiercely at you. 
Their masters are as a rule big, thick-set men, 
well advanced toward middle age, faultlessly 
dressed, and shaven to the quick. Or else the 
small dogs repose in the arms of tall, heavy women, 
who go mercilessly corseted and pay full tribute 
to modem requirements in facial decoration. 
They seem to lay great store by their pets, but 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 11 

they also find a kind glance for Harold. Some- 
times I imagine it is a different glance which they 
turn from their little dogs to Harold — a softer 
look, with the suggestion of wonder in it. From 
Harold and the baby they usually glance at Em- 
meline, I pass virtually unnoticed. 

I have mentioned the baby. When she is with 
us, Harold does not monopolize our neighbors' 
attention. It would be odd if it were otherwise. 
I am not so partisan as Emmeline in this matter, 
but I am inclined to think she is right when she 
says that our baby's eyes, of a liquid grayish-blue, 
staring in fascination out of the soft, pink swell 
of her cheeks, cannot help going straight to the 
heart of every normally constituted bystander. 
The women with small dogs in their arms smile at 
Harold, but they will bend down to the baby and 
hold out a finger to her and ask her name. Under 
such circumstances the behavior of Emmeline is 
rather difficult to explain. She is proud and 
resentful at the same time. Her moral judg- 
ments are apt to be swift and sharp, and when 
we are alone she has often characterized these 
neighbors of ours — the women, I mean — in pretty 
definite terms. Her opinion of women whose in- 
terests are satisfied by a husband and a toy dog 
would please Mr. Roosevelt, I imagine. Yet she 



12 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

never fails to tell me of the extraordinary charm 
our baby exerts on these very people whose out- 
look upon life and aesthetic standards she 
thoroughly despises. 

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, dur- 
ing our encounters in the elevator with our close- 
shaven, frock-coated neighbors and their fashion- 
ably dressed wives, I have looked at Emmeline's 
clothes and made comparisons not to her discredit 
but to my own. I should like Emmeline to cut as 
fine a figure as her neighbors, occasionally. Our 
neighbors' wives on a Sunday are dazzling in 
velvets and furs and plumes, whereas Emmeline 
has a natural disinclination for ostrich feathers 
even if we could afford to go in for such things. 
Her furs are not bad, but they are not new. They 
have worn well during the four years she has had 
them; nevertheless they are not new. 

I am not hinting at shabbiness. That is the 
last thing you would think of if you saw Emmeline. 
An exquisite cleanliness of figure, a fine animation 
in the eyes and the cut of her lips, an electric 
youthfulness of gesture — I know that clothes are 
vanity, but sometimes, on Sundays, I am seized 
with an extraordinary desire for velvets and 
feathers and furs. I feel that there must be a 
certain, spiritual tonic in the knowledge of being 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 13 

splendidly overdressed. It is a plunge into out- 
lawry which has its temptations to quiet people 
like myself who would never dare to put on a red 
tie. I sometimes wonder if the ancient Greeks, 
with all their inborn taste for simplicity in line 
and color, did not occasionally go in for a sar- 
torial spree. I really do not regret the fact that 
I cannot afford to give Emmeline a sealskin coat 
and a hat with aigrettes. Ninety-nine times out 
of a hundred I should feel uneasy to see her thus 
arrayed. But occasionally, yes, occasionally, I 
should like it. 

Frequently I catch myself wondering how the 
others can afford it. I take it that even when 
you make due allowance for the New York tem- 
perament it is fairly safe to assume that people 
living in the same apartment house occupy the 
same economic level. There are exceptions, of 
course. Tucked away in some rear-court apart- 
ment you will find people whose bank accounts 
would amaze their neighbors. But these are pre- 
cisely the ones who make the least display. They 
are maiden ladies of native American descent and 
the last of their line; or the widows of Tammany 
contractors and office-holders who divide their 
time between works of piety and a cat ; or prolific 
German families of the second generation living 



14 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

after the sober traditions of the race. Still, I feel 
sure that the majority of our neighbors in Bel- 
shazzar Court are in the same income class with 
myself. How, then, can they afford it all — ^velvets, 
furs, the Sunday afternoon motor-car in front of 
the door? I put aside the obvious explanation, 
that there are no children. That would make 
a very considerable difference, but still — motor- 
cars, bridge three times a week for very consider- 
able stakes, tables reserved at Shanley's for Elec- 
tion night and New Year's Eve — 

" They have to afford it," says Emmeline, with 
that incisive justice of hers in which I should 
sometimes like to see a deeper tincture of mercy. 
" When you come to think of it, a little pink- 
nosed dog cannot fill up a woman's life. There 
must be other interests." 

" In other words," I said, " they can't afford it. 
Do these people pay their bills ? " 

We used to call this a rhetorical question at 
college. My information on the subject is prob- 
ably as good as Emmeline's. Five minutes of 
pleasant gossip with one's newsdealer is illuminat- 
ing. Not that I am given to hanging over shop- 
counters, or that my newsdealer would be reckless 
enough to mention names. But since we are by 
way of being in the same line of business, I writing 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 15 

for the newspapers while he sells them, — and in- 
cidentally makes the better income of the two, — 
we do pass the time of day whenever I drop in 
for cigars or stationery. On such occasions, 
without quoting names, he will state it as a regret- 
table economic puzzle that so many people who 
ride in motor-cars should find it hard to pay their 
newspaper bills. There was one account, running 
up to something over eight dollars, he told me, 
that he was finally compelled to write down to 
profit and loss. The figures are instructive. 
Eleven cents a week — for it is an odd fact that 
people who ride in motor-cars read only the penny 
papers—makes forty-four cents a month. Throw 
in an occasional ten-cent magazine and you have 
a total expenditure of say seventy or eighty cents 
a month. An unpaid newspaper bill of eight dol- 
lars would therefore argue a condition of acute 
financial embarrassment extending over a period 
of nearly a year. 

My newsdealer's explanation was that garage 
bills must be paid with fair promptness and din- 
ners at Shanley's must be paid for in cash, seeing 
that the demand is always greater than the sup- 
ply. Whereas the competition among newsdealers 
is so sharp, and literature is on the whole a luxury 
so easily dispensed with, that the news vendor 



16 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

must be content to wait for his bill or lose his 
customer. And he went on to say that there is 
serious talk among men in his line of business 
of organizing a newsdealers' benevolent and pro- 
tective association for the enforcement of collec- 
tions from customers living in elevator apart- 
ments. 

" And then again," says Emmeline, " why 
shouldn't they be able to afford it? They don't 
eat." 

She goes on to show that inevitably a house 
with no children in it is a house with very little 
good food in it. Emmeline has made a study of 
eugenics, and she has come to the conclusion that 
the purest milk and a lot of it, the juiciest steaks, 
and the freshest vegetables constitute the best 
preventive of a neurotic citizenship in the future. 
It is a principle which she lives up to so resolutely 
that our food bills would strike many people as 
staggering. Now appetite, Emmeline argues, is 
very susceptible to suggestion. People learn to 
eat by watching their young. It's like caviare. 
But where there are no children life may easily 
be sustained on soda crackers and a glass of millk. 

And it is something more than that. (I am 
still paraphrasing Emmeline's views.) A dining- 
room table with children's eager, hungry faces 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 17 

around it ceases to be a mere dining-room table 
and becomes an altar. Dinner is not a mere 
replenishing of the physiological furnaces ; it 
partakes of the nature of a sacrament, with the 
mother as the high priestess, and the father, — 
well, let us call him the tithe-gatherer. Eating in 
common is a form of primitive nature-worship 
which the purest religions have taken over and 
sanctified. To break bread together — well, all 
this is quite obvious. But now try to think of a 
sacrament as being administered with a can- 
opener and a chafing-dish. 

" That is what they live on," says Emmeline, 
** things that come out of tins and paper boxes. 
At the end of a year it means a fur coat." Which 
isn't really very convincing. A single after- 
theater supper on Broadway will easily swallow 
up a week's frying-pan economies. But as an 
index of the attitude of those women who cook 
for their children to those women who have no 
children to cook for, Emmeline's opinion has its 
value. I admit that, being a woman, she is 
prejudiced, my own prejudices being to a very 
great extent the reflection of hers. 

Emmeline has a hatred for gossip that is quite 
extraordinary in one who is so closely confined to 
h^r home by household duties. Hence you will 



18 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

wonder where she obtains her information, some- 
times so startlingly intimate, regarding our neigh- 
bors' habits. Well, in the first place, Belshazzar 
Court is very much like those Russian prisons you 
read about, which hum and echo with news flashing 
along mysterious channels. The prison walls re- 
sound to ghostly taps in the still of the night. 
The water-pipes beat out their message. A 
handkerchief is waved at a window. A convict's 
shackled feet, dragging along the corridor, send 
out the Morse code of the cell. So it requires no 
special gift of imagination to sit in one's apart- 
ment and reconstruct the main outlines of the life 
about you. The mechanical piano downstairs has 
its say. There is a scamper of young feet in the 
hallway above. A voice of exasperation rasps its 
way down the dumb-waiter. A sewing machine 
whirs its short half hour and is silent. Little 
yelping volleys announce meal-time for the silken- 
haired Pekinese. As night comes on, the lights 
begin to flash up, revealing momentary silhouettes, 
groups, bits of still life. The alarm clock in the 
morning and the heavy, thoughtful tread at mid- 
night bespeak different habits and occupations. 
It is a world built up out of sounds. 

There are the servants. They are the telegraph 
wires of apartment-house life. Like a good many 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 19 

telegraph wires in the great world outside, they 
are sadly overburdened with trivialities. Yet a 
healthy cook or nursemaid will pick up during a 
ten minutes' excursion to the roof an amazing 
mass of miscellaneous information. This infor- 
mation she insists upon imparting to you. At 
first Emmeline would refuse to listen, protesting 
that she did not care to be burdened with other 
people's affairs. But we soon learned that the one 
form of class-distinction which domestic help will 
not tolerate is a refusal to meet them on the 
common level of gossip. What makes the prob- 
lem all the more difficult is that as a rule the best 
servants have the keenest appetite for petty 
scandal. Presumably a robust interest in one's 
own duties goes hand in hand with a healthy inter- 
est in the way other people are living up to their 
duty. Elizabeth, the only cook we have ever 
had who will not create a scene when somebody 
drops in unexpectedly for dinner, simply oozes in- 
formation. When I think of the secrets into 
which Elizabeth has initiated us with regard to 
our neighbors whom we have never met, I feel 
an embarrassment which is only relieved by the 
thought that these neighbors must be quite as 
well informed about ourselves. 

Perhaps I should know more of our neighbors 



20 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

if the electric lights in our stately hallways did 
not burn so dimly. I have mentioned the hand- 
some glass chandeliers in our main hall and ves- 
tibule. Unfortunately they give forth a faint, 
sepulchral light. Our elevator car, a massive 
cage of iron and copper, is quite dark. It may 
be that our landlord has artistic leanings and is 
trying to impart a subdued, studio atmosphere 
to his halls ; very dim illumination being, I under- 
stand, the proper thing in advanced circles. In- 
cidentally there must be a saving in electricity 
bills. At any rate, if you will take into considera- 
tion the fact that I have a habit of staring at 
people, even in broad daylight, without recogniz- 
ing them, and if you will add to that the fact that 
a day's fussing over proofs and exchanges in the 
office is followed by an hour in the Subway over 
the evening papers, it is quite plain why I have 
difficulty in remembering the faces of neighbors 
whom I occasionally run across. 

Most of the neighbors are very much the same 
way. An hour in the dead atmosphere of the Sub- 
way wilts the social virtues out of a man. We 
manage to make our way listlessly into the upper 
air. We trudge wearily through the handsome 
iron doors of our apartment house. We take our 
places in opposite corners of the elevator car and 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 21 

stare up at the roof of the cage or count the floors 
as we pass. Three or four of us leave at the 
same floor and go our several ways, I to number 
43 on the right, one man to number 42 straight 
ahead, one to the left, and so forth. As I have 
said, there are nine apartments to the floor. 

Emmeline insists that I should not read in the 
Subway. She says I ought to lean back and close 
my eyes and rest. But she forgets that the man 
you lean back upon is sure to protest. Lateral 
pressure enforces an attitude of extreme rigidity 
during the rush hour, and to stand up straight 
with one's eyes closed tight is obviously ridiculous. 
Even when I find a seat, I do not like to close my 
eyes. It gives people the impression that I am 
pretending to be asleep in order to avoid giving 
up my seat to a woman, and on that subject I 
have the courage of my convictions. An hour in 
the Subway can be made endurable only by some 
such narcotic as the evening papers aff'ord; and 
when you have read through three or four papers, 
your eyes naturally show the strain. 

Of course, if we stay long enough in Belshazzar 
Court, we shall make acquaintances. Accident 
will bring that about. For instance, there are a 
number of men in my line of work and the allied 
professions who meet every now and then in a 



22 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

little German cafe on the East side in the 
'Eighties. It is not a club, since there are neither 
members nor bj-laws nor initiation fees, nor, 
worst of all abominations, a set subject for papers 
and discussion. People simply drift in and out. 
We keep late hours, and it is a well-known fact 
that in the early hours of the morning friendships 
are rather easily formed. That was the way I 
met Brewster. 

Brewster (I don't know his first name) is a tall, 
thin, sallow-faced man of thirty-five who looks 
the Middle West he comes from. I had seen him 
at two of our meetings before we fell into talk. 
He spoke sparingly, not because he was shy, but 
because as a rule he had trouble in finding the 
right phrase. It was not until we were walking 
across town toward the Subway one night that I 
found out that Brewster is associate professor 
of mathematics at my old university. But he 
has ideas outside of Euclid. He is a Radical, he 
detests New York, and he is looking forward to 
the time when he can get away. But I imagine 
that he is not looking forward very eagerly. Your 
Radical loves the city while he curses it. At any 
rate, the Subway trains make speed at night and 
I was at my station before I knew it. Had he 
passed his own.'* No, it appeared that this was 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 23 

his station, too. That was pleasant, I said. Liv- 
ing in the same neighborhood I hoped we would 
see more of each other in the future. He said it 
would be pleasant indeed ; his own address was 
Belshazzar Court. He had been there more than 
two years now. He lived on the third floor, in 47. 

" That would be directly across the court from 
43?" 

He thought it was. 

That was two weeks ago. We have not yet 
found the time to drop in on Brewster. But 
sometimes I catch a glimpse of him through the 
window-curtains of his dining-room. Of course 
I had seen his figure pass across the window be- 
fore, but naturally had never looked long enough 
to fix his face in my memory. He has his two 
children and his unmarried sister in the apart- 
ment with him. The mother of the children is 
dead. The elder is a boy of seven, and I think 
he must be the pleas ant- faced lad who on several 
occasions has rung our bell and complained that 
our Harold has robbed him of various bits of 
personal property — a toy pistol, a clay pipe, and 
several college emblems of the kind that come in 
cigarette boxes. 

That is all I know of Brewster directly. Em- 
meline knows a little more. She has it from our 



24 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

cook, who has it from Brewster's cook. He goes 
out very rarely. In the morning he escorts the 
little bov to a private school half a mile away. 
This he does on his way to the university. He 
comes home a little earlier than I do, usually with 
a grip full of books. Our cook says that Brewster 
is invariably present when his sister gives the little 
girl her bath before putting her to bed ; the child 
is only two years old. The boy has his supper 
with his father and aunt, and it is Brewster him- 
self who superintends his going to bed. Tliis 
process is extremely involved and is marked by a 
great deal of rough-and-tumble hilarity. Late at 
night, as I sit reading or writing, I catch a glimpse 
of liim over his work at the big dining-room table, 
correcting examination papers, I suppose, though 
I believe he does some actuarial work for an insur- 
ance company. He will get up occasionally for a 
turn or two about the room, or to fill his pipe, or 
to fetch from the kitchen a cup of tea which he 
drinks cold. I see him at work long after mid- 
night. 

Have I gone into all this detail concerning 
Brewster mercl}' because he happens to live in 
47, which is just across the court from 43, or be- 
cause our habits and our interests really do touch 
at so many points? If Brewster were writing 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 25 

down his impressions of Belshazzar Court at mid- 
night, with myself as the central figure, his story 
would be very much like mine. A glimpse into 
the windows of our dining-room would show me, 
too, in a clutter of papers, rustling through my 
exchange clippings, dipping into a volume of 
" Pickwick " for a moment's rest, striking in- 
numerable matches to keep a reluctant pipe 
a-going, and drinking cold tea, — too much cold 
tea, I am afraid. 

Yes, Brewster and I have something in com- 
mon. But then I wonder, if I were living one 
floor above, in 53, and chance had made me ac- 
quainted with Smith who lives across the court in 
57, would Smith and I discover that there are 
human ties between us other than our dependence 
on the same central heating plant? For one 
thing, I know that the Smiths have a baby which 
frequently cries at night in unison with our own. 
Sometimes the Smith baby wakes up ours. Some- 
times the initiative comes from our own side. 

Because I drink so much cold tea before going 
to bed, I find it difficult to fall asleep. I lie 
awake and think of Belshazzar Court with a fond- 
ness that I cannot muster at any other time. 
The house offers me an extraordinary sense of 
security ; not for myself, but for those who belong 



26 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

to me. It is a comfort to have one's wife and 
children snuglj tucked away in one's own particu- 
lar cluster of cells at the end of one's own ob- 
scure little passageway, where an enemy would 
need Ariadne's guiding thread to find them. The 
cave man must have felt some such satisfaction 
when he had stored his young and their mother 
into some peculiarly inacessible rock cleft. 

I suppose the dark is a favorable time for the 
recurrence of such primordial feelings. In the 
dark the need for human fellowship wells up to 
the surface. Athwart the partitions of lath and 
mortar, we of Belshazzar Court experience the 
warm, protective sensation which comes from 
huddling together against the invisible menaces 
of the night. 

Decidedly, I must give up drinking so much cold 
tea. My eyes to-morrow will show the strain. 
But it is wonderful, too, this lying awake and 
feeling that you can almost catch the heart-throb 
of hundreds, above you, below you, on both sides. 
My neighbors undergo a magic transformation. 
Deprived of individuality, — viewed, so to speak, 
under their eternal aspect, — they grow lovable. 
Belshazzar's Court is transformed. In the day 
it is a barracks. At night it becomes a walled 
refuge, a tabernacle almost. The pulse of life 



IN BELSHAZZAR COURT 27 

beats through its halls with just enough momen- 
tum to make a solemn music which gradually over- 
comes the effects of the cold tea. Intermittent 
noises twist themselves into vague fugues and 
arabesques. Somewhere on the floor above, heavy 
footsteps go back and forth in leisurely prepara- 
tion for bed. Somewhere across the court, people 
have returned from the theater. Evidently they 
are still under the exhilaration of the lights and 
the crowd. They pass judgment on the play and 
their voices are thoughtlessly fresh and animated, 
considering how late it is ; but somehow you are 
not disturbed. With utter lack of interest you 
hear a child's wail break out — it is the Smith 
baby — and you hear the mother's " hush, hush," 
falling into a somnolent, crooning chant. Out- 
side, a motor-car starts into life with a grinding 
and a whir and a sputter, and you set yourself to 
follow its receding hum, which becomes a drone 
and then a murmur and then silence, but you are 
not sure whether it is yet silence. As you are 
still wondering there comes the end of things, 
except that now and then you stir to the clamor 
of the elevator bell, ringing indignantly for the 
boy who has run the car up to the top floor and 
gone to sleep in the hall. 



n 

THE STREET 

It is two short blocks from my office near Park 
Row to the Subway station where I take the ex- 
press for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in 
the year it is my endeavor to traverse this dis- 
stance as quickly as I can. This is done by cut- 
ting diagonally across the street traffic. By vir- 
tue of the law governing right-angled triangles I 
thus save as much as fifty feet and one-fifth of a 
minute of time. In the course of a year this sav- 
ing amounts to sixty minutes, which may be 
profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of 
" The Moonshiner's Bride," supplemented by an 
intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. 

But with the coming of warm weather my 
habits change. It grows difficult to plunge into 
the murk of the Subway. A foretaste of June 
is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our of- 
fice building, which have been put aside for brief 
periods during the first deceptive approaches of 
spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, 

28 



THE STREET 29 

have been definitely removed. The steel-workers 
pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid- 
season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold 
and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda 
fountains are bright with new compounds whose 
names ingeniously reflect the world's progress 
from da}^ to day in politics, science, and the arts. 
From my window I can see the long black steam- 
ships pushing down to the sea, and they raise 
vague speculations in my mind about the cost of 
living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontaine- 
bleau. On such a day I am reminded of my 
physician's orders, issued last December, to walk 
a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I 
stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking 
my train farther uptown, at Fourteenth Street. 

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk 
walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm 
well contracted, and a general aspect of money 
in the bank. But here enters human perversity. 
The only place where I am in the mood to walk 
after the prescribed military fashion is in the 
open country. Just where by all accounts I ought 
to be sauntering without heed to time, studying 
the lovely texts which Nature has set down in 
the modest type-forms selected from her inex- 
haustible fonts, — in the minion of ripening berries, 



so BELSHAZZAR COURT 

in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate 
of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond 
of the dust, — there I stride along with my own 
thoughts and see little. 

And in the city, where I should swing along 
briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway 
to linger oyer? On Broadway, Nature has used 
her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, build- 
ing fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed 
with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; 
shrieking proclamations of auction sales written 
in letters of fire on yast canyasses ; railwa}' posters 
in scarlet and blue and green ; rotatory barber- 
poles striying at the national colors and producing 
yertigo ; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the 
primary colors — surely none of these things needs 
poring oyer. And I know them with my eyes 
closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in 
gymnasium dress demonstrate the yirtue of home 
exercises ; the windows where other young men do 
nothing but put on and take off patent reyersible 
near-linen collars ; where young women deftly roll 
cigarettes ; where other young women whittle at 
sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know 
these things by heart, yet I linger oyer them in 
flagrantly unh^-gienic attitudes, my shoulders bent 
forward and my chest and diaphragm in a posi- 



THESTREET 31 

tion precisely the reverse of that prescribed by 
the doctor. 

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before 
these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that 
in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost 
never herself, but is either supernatural or arti- 
ficial. Nature, for instance, never intended that 
razors should cut wood and remain sharp ; that 
linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the 
longer they are worn ; that glass should not 
break ; that ink should not stain ; that gauze 
should not tear; that an object worth five dollars 
should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen 
in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet 
now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up 
with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me 
the other day how strange a thing it is that the 
one street which has become a synonym for " real 
life " to all good suburban Americans is not real 
at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with 
imitations. 

The windows on Broadway glow with wax 
fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta 
drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses 
in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich 
feathers have been plucked in East side tenements. 
The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are 



32 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne 
in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The 
tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles 
in the drug shops are of paper. " Why," said 
Williams, " even the jewelry sold in the Japanese 
auction stores is not genuine, and the auctioneers 
are not Japanese." 

This bustling mart of commerce, as the genera- 
tion after the Civil War used to say, is only a 
world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial 
fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, 
woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and 
women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are 
real, but not always. Williams and I once stood 
for a long while and gazed at a young woman pos- 
ing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether 
she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Wil- 
liams gloated over me. But how do I know her 
wink was real? At any rate, the great mass of 
human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies 
who smile out of charming morning costumes are 
obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug 
Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their 
equanimity in the severest winter weather only 
because of their wire-and-plaster constitution. 
The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china 
and excelsior. Illusion everywhere. 



THE STREET 33 

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only 
have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes 
and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I 
was a boy and was taken to the circus it was 
always an amazing thing to me that there should 
be so many people in the street moving in a direc- 
tion away from the circus. Something of this 
sensation still besets me whenever we go down in 
the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Ca- 
ruso. The presence of all the other people on 
our train is simple enough. They are all on their 
way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in 
the trains that flash by in the opposite direction.'' 
It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I 
try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway 
on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. 
The natural thing is that the living tide as it 
presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy 
around me. I know that there are people moving 
north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. 
This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It 
is I against half the world. 

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces 
one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor 
has told him that the surest way of fighting down 
the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office 
to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I 



34. BELSHAZZAR COURT 

salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, 
which is to exchange greetings backward over the 
shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate 
minuet. Because we have passed each other be- 
fore recognition came, our hands fly out backward. 
Now we whirl half around, so that I who have 
been moving north face the west, while Williams, 
who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our 
clasped hands strain at each other as we stand 
there poised for flight after the first greeting. A 
quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said 
good-by. 

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, 
there ensues a change of geographical position 
which corresponds to a change of soul within us. 
I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of 
trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams 
recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place 
shortly after the one he is bound for. So the 
tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who 
have been facing west, complete the half circle and 
swing south. Williams veers due north, and we 
two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor 
of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained 
stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it. 

"Well, what's the good word? " says WilHams. 

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of 



THE STREET 35 

optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each 
other what the good word is. We take it for 
granted that neither of us has anything but a 
chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What 
other word but the good word is tolerable in the 
lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is 
only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with 
yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our 
acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. 
I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion 
to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in 
communion with neuralgia ; how can that possibly 
concern him? Another manuscript came back this 
morning from an editor who regretted that his is 
the most unintelligent body of readers in the coun- 
try. The third cook in three weeks left us last 
night after making vigorous reflections on my 
wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only 
an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black 
steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, 
the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat un- 
profitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of 
paper, had become almost a nausea. But Wil- 
liams will know nothing of this from me. Why 
should he? He may have been sitting up all night 
with a sick child. At this very moment the thought 
of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing 



36 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

eyes, may be tearing at his entrails ; but he in turn 
gives me the good word, and many others after 
that, and we pass on. 

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism 
of people on Broadway, in the Subway, and in the 
shops and offices — is it really a sign of high spirit- 
ual courage, or is it just lack of sensibilit}'? Do 
we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck 
up, to never say die, because we are brave men, 
or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and 
the imagination to react to pain.'' It may be even 
worse than that. It may be part of our com- 
mercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up 
a good front. 

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to 
be walking down Broadway on business when there 
is a stricken child at home. The world cannot 
possibly need him at that moment as much as his 
own flesh and blood does. It is not courage ; it is 
brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted 
to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feel- 
ings that run deep beneath the surface, and 
bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a 
man really suffers he will show it. If a man 
cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he 
will end by having none to show. How much of 
Broadway's optimism is — ^But here I am para- 



THE STREET 37 

phrasing William James's Principles of Psy- 
chology^ which the reader can just as well consult 
for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907. 
Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Wil- 
liams's children are all in perfect health, and my 
envelope from the editor has brought a check in- 
stead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions 
that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way 
a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel 
around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the 
rate of two for a quarter. If anyone is ever in- 
clined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, 
it is only necessary to recall the number of com- 
modities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. 
In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I 
buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents 
apiece. As a matter of fact, they are probably 
ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to 
his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the 
seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars 
selling for a single quarter. Two men who have 
concluded a business deal in which each has com- 
mendably tried to get the better of the other may 
call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half- 
dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are 
such. But friends sitting down together will al- 
ways demand cigars that go for a round sum, 



.ss BELSHAZZAR COURT 

two tor a quarter or throo for fifty (if the oditoi''s 
check is wlu-it it ought to Iv). 

When people speak of the want oi real comrade- 
ship among women, I soinetinies wonder if one of 
the reasons may not be that the prices which 
women are accustomed to pay are individualistic 
instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the 
street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of 
two items for a single coin. It is intinitely worse 
in the department stores. Treating a friend to 
sometliing that costs $!^.T9 is inconceivable. But 
I have rciilly wandered from my point. 

** Well, be good/' says Williams, and rushes off 
to catch his boat. 

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway 
people pay tribute to the principle of goodness 
that rules this world, both in the way they greet 
and in the way th.ey part. We salute by asking 
each other what the good word is. When we say 
fi:ood-bv we enioin each other to be sjood. The 
humorous assumption is that gi\y devils like Wil- 
liams and me need to be constantly warned against 
straying off into the primrose paths that run out 
of Broadway. 

Simple, humorous, average American nuin! 
You have left your suburban couch in time to walk 
half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for 



TJIK STREET 39 

the city. You have read your rnoming paper: dis- 
cussed the weather, the Kaiser, and the prospects 
for lettuce with your neighbor: and made the office 
only a minute- Jate. You have heen fastened to 
your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an 
hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamor- 
ous, overheated restaurant while you watched your 
hat and coat. At odd moments during the day 
the thought of doctor's hills, rent hills, school hills, 
has insisted on receiving attention. At the end 
of the day, laden with parcels from the market, 
from the hardware store, from the seedman, you 
are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when 
you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word, 
sends you on your way with the injunction to be 
good — not to play roulette, not to open wine, not 
to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the 
stage door. Be good, simple, humorous, average 
suburban American ! 

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday 
Supplement has given it a meaning which is not 
mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in 
spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the 
soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban 
about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man 
in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic 
creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper 



40 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

brought forth and UAined Common People, who 
begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent- 
Paver and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on 
lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, 
though one hates to do it, I must say ** clean-cut."' 
The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp- 
faced, almost insolent young men. There are not 
very many old men in the crowd, though I see any 
number of ffrav-haired vouns men. Seldom do 
you detect the traditional signs of age. the sag- 
ging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal con- 
tour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, 
the old-young, but rarely quite the old. 

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, 
eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A 
very ordinary mind may be working behind that 
clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have 
known the shock of young men who look like kings 
of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They 
are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that 
athletic carriage which is helped out by our tri- 
umphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought 
to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages 
and all stations into a uniformity of padded 
shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine 
I ought to despise aur habit of wearing elegant 
shoddy where the European chooses honest. 



THE STREET 41 

clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with 
externals, and in outward appearances a Broad- 
way crowd beats the world. yEsthetically we sim- 
ply are in a class by ourselves when compared 
with the Englishman and the Teuton in their 
skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and 
German ambassadors at Washington do their 
worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain 
it against the world. The truth must out. Ruat 
cesium. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste, 

Williams laughs at mj' lyrical outbursts. But 
I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the 
women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer 
thing is a woman than a man of her class ! To 
see this for yourself you have only to walk up 
Broadway until the southward-bearing stream 
breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to 
east. You have passed out of the commercial dis- 
trict into the region of factories. It is well on 
toward dark, and the barracks that go by the 
unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out 
their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd 
has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower 
Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp 
of a host. It is an army of women, with here and 
there a flying detachment of the male. 

On the faces of the men the day's toil has writ- 



42 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ton its record even as on the woman, but in a 
much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the 
soul of these men into brutish indifference. But in 
the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make 
it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listless- 
ness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you 
read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vul- 
garity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and 
imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder 
with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth 
Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. 
But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas 
woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap mate- 
rial. The spirit of grace which is the birthright 
of her sex cannot be killed — not even by the pres- 
ence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. 
She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America 
has accentuated her title. This America which 
drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which 
takes from her cheeks the color she has brought 
from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes 
restitution by remolding her in more delicate, 
more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege 
of charm — and neurosis. 

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances 
and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets 
itself be swallowed up with meek good nature. 



THE STREET 43 

Our amazing good nature ! Political philosophers 
have deplored the fact. They have urged us to 
be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being 
stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the 
editor. I agree that only in that way can we be 
rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of 
ticket-speculators, of taxicab extortioners, of 
insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent conges- 
tion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and 
barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with 
the social philosophers. But then I am not typical 
of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects 
itself into the small of my back, I twist around 
and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the 
innocent mechanical result of a whole series of 
elbows and backs extending the length of the car, 
to where the first cause operates in the form of a 
station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cat- 
tle into their stalls. In the faces about me there 
is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, 
instead of raising barricades in the Subway and 
hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns 
about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to 
the lurching of the train, and young voices call 
out cheerfully, " Plenty of room ahead." 

Horribly good-natured ! We have taken a 
phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned 



44 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this 
were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously 
predestined to subjection, one might understand. 
But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant 
Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I 
have called them, that they should submit is a 
puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democ- 
racy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies 
of physical contact, the feeling that a man's 
natural condition is to push and be pushed, to 
shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to 
take it like a man when no chance presents itself 
— that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like 
the prizes of life for which men have fought in 
these United States. You struggle, you win or 
lose. If the other man wins there is no envy ; ad- 
miration rather, provided he has not shouldered 
and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom 
from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good 
nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I 
see signs of the approaching change. People do 
not call out, " Plenty of room ahead," so fre- 
quently as they used to. 

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in 
the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball 
bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of 
so much oppression and injustice, where is the 



THE STREET 4,5 

supposed cruelty of the "mob"? I am ready to 
affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that 
it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, 
fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the 
crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes 
from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional 
distorters of right thinking and right feeling. 
The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, 
brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in 
the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little 
of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. 
For the most part he sits there with folded arms, 
thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that 
there are other things in life besides baseball. No, 
it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoon- 
ists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 
" local pride," with their exaggerated gloatings 
over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a 
losing team, who are responsible. It is these 
demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of 
loving only a winner — but if I keep on I shall be 
in politics before I know it. 

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Sub- 
way a face over which the pall of depression has 
settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic 
pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall 
seeing anyone smile over these long serials of 



46 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

humorous adventure wliich run from da}' to day 
and from year to 3'ear. I have seen readers turn 
mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over 
them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips un- 
consciously spelling out the long legends which 
issue in the fonn of little balloons and lozenges 
from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, 
giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive hus- 
bands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects, — an 
entire zoology. If any stimulus rises from these 
pages to the puzzled brain, the etfect is not visible. 
I imagine that by dint of repetition through the 
years these grotesque creations have become a 
reahty to millions of readers. It is no longer a 
question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate 
Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, 
have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise 
I cannot see why readers of the funny page should 
appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid. 

This by way of anticipation. What the doctor 
has said of exercise being a habit which grows 
easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes 
of walking that are wearisome. I find myself 
strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to 
take ray train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, 
Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now 
on a different Broadway. The crowd is no longer 



THE STREET 47 

north and south, but flows in every direction. It 
is churned up at every corner and spreads itself 
across the squares and open places. Its appear- 
ance has changed. It is no longer a factory popu- 
lation. Women still predominate, but they are 
the women of the professions and trades which 
center about Madison Square — business women of 
independent standing, women from the magazine 
offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. 
You detect the bachelor girl in the current which 
sets in toward the home quarters of the undomes- 
ticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating- 
places whose fixed table d'hote prices flash out in 
illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther 
north and the crowd becomes tinged with the cur- 
rent of that Broadway which the outside world 
knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the 
workers, men appear in English clothes with canes, 
women desperately corseted with plumes and 
jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat 
of Little Old New York. 

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die 
down as quickly almost as they manifested them- 
selves. The idlers and those who minister to them 
have heard the call of the dinner hour and have 
vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters 
by no means in keeping with the cut of their gar- 



48 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

ments and their apparent indirt'erence to useful 
employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It 
is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval 
between the last of the matinee and shopping 
crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The 
monster electric sign-boards have not begun to 
gleam and tlash and revolve and confound the eye 
and the senses. At night the electric Niagara 
hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark 
doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety 
wooden hoardings. Not an imperi^il street this 
Broadway at 6.S0 of a summer's afternoon. 
Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, 
cheap haberdaiiheries, cheap restaurants, grimy 
little newspaper agencies and ticket-otlices, and 
*• demonstration ■' stores for patent foods, patent 
waters, patent razors. . . . 

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the 
fast fading light, before the magic hand of Edison 
wipes the wrinkles from your face and galviinizes 
you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with 
your tinsel shop-windows, with your putfy-faced, 
unshaven men leaning against door-posts and 
chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed 
newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, 
and your itinerant women whose eyes flash from 
side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw 



THE STREET 49 

the hearts of millions to yourself, dingy. Gay 
White Way, Via Lobsteria Dolorosa! 

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time 
to go home. I have walked farther than I in- 
tended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and 
tired. The romance of the crowd has disap- 
peared. Romance cannot survive that short pas- 
sage of Longacre Square, where the art of the 
theater and of the picture-postcard flourish in an 
atmosphere impregnated with gasoline. As I 
glance into the windows of the automobile sales- 
rooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel 
of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all 
at once of the children at home. They expand 
and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. 
I smile into the face of a painted promenader, 
but how is she to know that it is not at her I 
smile but at the sudden recollection of what the 
baby said at the breakfast-table that morning.'' 
Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the 
Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses 
against contact with the external world, and thus 
resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down 
into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time 
I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar 
Court. 



m 

THE SHOW 

Feom Belshazzar Court to the theater district 
is only a thirty minutes' ride in the Subway, but 
usually we reach the theater a few minutes after 
the rise of the curtain. Why this should be I have 
never been able to explain. It is a fact that on 
such nights we have dinner half an hour early, and 
Emmeline comes to the table quite ready to go out 
except that she has her cloak to slip on. Never- 
theless we are a few minutes late. While Emme- 
line is slipping on her cloak I glance through 
the editorial page in the evening paper, answer 
the telephone, and recall several bits of work I 
overlooked at the office. I then give Harold a 
drink of water in bed, help Emmeline with her hat, 
clean out the drawers in my writing-table, tell 
Harold to stop talking to himself and go to sleep, 
and hunt for the theater tickets in the pockets of 
my street clothes. After that I have time to read 
a page or two of John Galsworthy and go in to 
see that Harold is well covered up. Emmeline 

50 



THE SHOW 51 

always makes me save time by having me ring for 
the elevator while she is drawing on her gloves. 
Nevertheless we are a few minutes late for the first 
act. 

But if I frequently leave Belshazzar Court in a 
state of mild irritation, my spirits rise the moment 
we enter the Subway. I am stirred by the lights 
and the crowd, this vibrant New York crowd of 
which I have spoken before, so aggressively youth- 
ful, so prosperous, so strikingly overdressed, and 
carrying off its finery with a dash that is quite 
remarkable considering that we are only a half- 
way-up middle-class crowd jammed together in a 
public conveyance. Since our trip abroad some 
years ago I am convinced that the Parisian woman 
needs all the chic and esprit she can encompass. 
I will affirm that in half an hour in the Subway, 
at any time of day, I see more charming faces than 
we saw during six weeks in Paris. I have hitherto 
been timid about expressing this opinion in print, 
but only the other night I sat up to read Inno- 
cents Abroad after many years. What Mark 
Twain has to say of the Parisian grisette encour- 
ages me to make this confession of faith. As I 
swing from my strap and scan the happy, well-to- 
do faces under the glow of the electric lamps, I 
sometimes find myself wondering what reason 



52 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

William D. Haywood can possibly have for being 
dissatisfied with things as they are. 

We are usually late at the theater, but not al- 
ways. There are times when Harold will get 
through with his dinner without being once called 
to order. He then announces that he is tired and 
is anxious to get into bed. On such occasions 
Emmeline grows exceedingly nervous. She feels 
his head and makes him open his mouth and say, 
" Aaa-h-h," so that she may look down his throat. 
If Harold carries out his promise and does 
promptly go to sleep, it intensifies our anxiety and 
threatens to spoil our evening; but it does also 
save a little time. It brings us to the theater a 
minute or two before the curtain goes up, and 
gives us a chance to study the interior decorations 
of the auditorium, completed at great cost, the 
exact amount of which I cannot recall w^ithout 
my evening paper. If you will remember that we 
go to the theater perhaps a dozen times during 
the season, and that the number of new theaters 
on Broadway every season is about that number, 
you will see why very frequently we should be 
finding ourselves in a new house. 

It is a matter of regret to me that I cannot 
grow enthusiastic over theatrical interiors. I do 
my best, but the novel arrangement of proscenium 



THE SHOW 53 

boxes and the upholstery scheme leave me cold. I 
recall what the evening paper said of the new 
Blackfriars. Its architecture is a modification of 
the Parthenon at Athens, and it is nine stories 
high and equipped with business offices and bache- 
lor quarters. It was erected as one of a chain 
of amusement houses stretching clear across to 
San Francisco, by a manager who began three 
years ago as a moving-picture impresario in the 
Bronx. Having made a hit in the " legitimate " 
with an unknown actress in a play by an unknown 
writer, he immediately signed a contract with the 
playwright for his next six plays, hired six com- 
panies for the road, and built a chain of theaters 
to house the plays. This is the American of it. 
If three years from now this Napoleon of Long- 
acre Square is back at his five-cent moving-picture 
place in the Bronx it will also be the American 
of it. When I tell Emmeline that the ceiling has 
been copied from a French chateau, she looks up 
and says nothing. 

The curtain goes up on the famous ten-thou- 
sand-dollar drawing-room set which has been the 
hit of the season. The telephone on the real Louis 
XVI table rings, the English butler comes in to 
answer the call, and the play is on. The ex- 
traordinary development of the telephone on the 



54 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

New York stage is possibly our most notable and 
meritorious contribution to contemporary dra- 
matic art. The telephone serves a far higher 
purpose than Sardou's parlor-maid with the 
feather-duster. It is plain, of course, that the 
dramatist's first purpose is to sound a universal 
human note. And the telephone is something which 
comes very close to every one of us. If the Eng- 
lish butler, instead of answering a telephone call, 
picks up the instrument and himself calls for some 
familiar number, like 3100 Spring, which is Police 
Headquarters, you can actually perceive the re- 
sponsive thrill which sweeps the house. The note 
of universal humanity has been struck. 

This point is worth keeping in mind. If I am 
somewhat insistent on being in time for the be- 
ginning of the play, it is because I want to subject 
myself to the magic touch of the telephone bell, 
and not because I am afraid of missing the drift 
of the playwright's story. Of that there is no 
danger, because I know the story already. I don't 
know whether college courses in the drama still 
spend as much time as they used to fifteen years 
ago in laying emphasis on the fact that the first 
act of a play is devoted to exposition. If college 
courses are really as modern as they are said to 
be, professors of the drama will now be teaching 



THE SHOW 55 

their students that the playwright's real prepara- 
tion for his conflict and his climax is not to be 
found in the first act at all, but several weeks be- 
fore the play is produced, in the columns of the 
daily press. 

If Goethe were writing Faust to-day he would 
not lay his Prologue in Heaven but in the news- 
papers. I know what I am about to see and hear, 
because I have read all the newspaper chatter 
while the play was in incubation and in rehearsal. 
I have been taken into confidence by the managers 
just before they sailed for Europe in the imperial 
suite of the Imperator. If they omitted anything, 
they have cabled it over from Paris at enormous 
expense. Through interviews with stars and lead- 
ing ladies, through calculated indiscretions on the 
part of the box-office with regard to advance sales, 
through the newspaper reviews after the first 
night, I am educated up to the act of seeing a 
play with a thoroughness that the post-graduate 
department of Johns Hopkins might envy. 

Consequently, there is not the slightest danger, 
even if we come late, that I shall laugh in the 
wrong place or fail to laugh in the right place, or 
that Emmeline will fail to grope for her handker- 
chief at the right time. Through the same agency 
of the newspaper the funniest lines, the strongest 



56 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

" punch," the most sympathetic bits of dialogue 
have been located and charted. At college I used 
to be told that the tremendous appeal of the Greek 
drama was dependent in large measure on the fact 
that it dealt with stories which were perfectly 
familiar to the public. The Athenian audience 
came to the theater expectant, surcharged with 
emotion, waiting eagerly for the proper cue to 
let its feelings go. But Athens was not con- 
ceivably better worked up than New York is to- 
day when it goes to the theater. 

Even James M. Barrie does it. I remember 
when Emmeline and I went to see Barrie's What 
Every Woman Knows, some years ago. What we 
really went for, like ten thousand other good peo- 
ple of New York, was to hear the much-advertised 
tag with which Barrie ended his play, to the effect, 
namely, that woman was not made out of man's 
rib but out of his funny bone. I do not recall 
that a single dramatic reviewer in New York after 
the first night omitted to concentrate on that 
epigram ; if he did he must have been called down 
severely by the managing editor. Now it is my 
sincere belief that the Barrie joke is a poor one. 
It is offensively smart, it has the " punch " which 
it is Barrie's merit to omit so regularly from his 
plays. It is inferior to any number of delightful 



THE SHOW 57 

lines in that really beautiful play. That is, I say 
so now when I am in my right senses. But when 
Emmeline and I, under the hypnotic spell of the 
newspapers, went to see What Every Wornan 
Knows, what was it that we waited for through 
four longish acts, — what but that unhappy quip 
which everybody else was waiting for.? Of course 
we laughed and applauded. We laughed in the 
same shamefaced and dutiful spirit in which 
people stand up in restaurants when the band 
plays the " Star-Spangled Banner." Often I 
wonder what would Shakespeare and Moliere not 
have accomplished if they had had the newspapers 
to hypnotize the audience for them instead of be- 
ing compelled to do so themselves. 

Hypnotism everywhere. One of the popular 
plays that we never went to see was recommended 
to Emmeline by a very charming woman who said 
it was a play which every woman ought to take 
her husband to see. In itself that is as admirable 
a bit of dramatic criticism as could be distilled out 
of several columns of single-leaded minion. But 
the trouble was that this charming woman had not 
thought it out for herself. She had found the 
phrase in the advertising notices of this play. It 
was so pat, so quotable, and the press agent was 
so evidently sincere in using it, that it seemed a 



58 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

pity not to pass it on to others. After half a 
dozen friends had recommended the play to Em- 
meline as a good one for me to be taken to, she 
rebelled and said she would not go. She was in- 
tellectually offended. Her ostensible reason was 
that she doubted whether the play would do me 
any good. I had my revenge not long after when 
I offered to take her to a play which dealt with 
woman's extravagance in dress, and which the ad- 
vertisements said every man ought to take his wife 
to see. Emmeline said that my sense of humor 
often betrays me. 

This, I am sorry to say, happens rather fre- 
quently. My feeble jest about the play which all 
wives ought to be taken to see was devised on the 
spur of the moment. But there is one sly bit of 
humor which I regularly employ and which I never 
fail to regret. This happens whenever, in reply 
to Emmeline's suggestion that we take in one of 
the new plays, I say with malice aforethought that 
the piece is one to which a man would hardly care 
to take his wife. The response is instantaneous. 
It makes no difference that our views on this sub- 
ject are identical. Apostrophizing me as an ex- 
emplar of that muddle-headed thing which is inter- 
changeably known as fossilized Puritanism and 
Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, Emmeline begins by ask- 



THE SHOW 59 

ing whether a play that is not fit for a man's 
wife to see is fit for the husband of that wife. 
Since I agree with her, the question remains un- 
answerable. She then goes on to ask whether it 
might not be an excellent thing for the theater to 
abolish the distinction between plays that a man's 
wife can see and those she cannot see, and to make 
it a law, preferably a Federal law based on social 
justice, that no man shall be allowed to enter a 
theater without a woman companion. 

It is a sore point with her. We had as guest 
at dinner one night an estimable young man who 
told us that, being anxious to take his betrothed to 
a certain play, he had bought a ticket for the 
family circle the night before, to see whether the 
play was a fit one for the young woman to be taken 
to. Emmeline cast one baleful glance at the young 
man, which he fortunately failed to catch, his 
head being bent over the asparagus. But she has 
never asked him to call again. To me, afterward, 
she scarified the poor young man. 

" Imagine," she said. " Here is a man in love 
with a woman. He is about to take her, and give 
himself to her, for better and for worse. He asks 
her to face the secrets of life and the fear of death 
with him. But he is afraid to take her to the 
theater with him." 



60 BELSHAZ2AR COURT 

The joy of combat makes me forget that my 
views are quite the same. 

'* It shows his thoughtfulness," I said. " There 
are any number of nasty plays in town." 

"Why are they here?" she asked. 

" I'm sure I don't know.'' 

" I'll tell you why," she said : " to meet the de- 
mand for plays that a man cannot take his wife 
o. 

I assured her that tliis common phrase really 
did not mean all she read into it. The average 
citizen, I said, does not look upon his wife as a 
tender plant to be shielded against the breath of 
harm. It was only another instance of our fiilling 
in with a phrase, and repeating it in parrot 
fashion, until we are surprised to find ourselves 
living up to it. But Emmeline said it was Anglo- 
Saxon hypocrisy superimposed on the universal 
Sklarcnmoral from which woman suffers. At this 
point I am convinced that a sense of humor often 
does betray one. 

Steeped in the sincere, if often ferociously 
sincere, realism of the Russian writers, it is plain 
why one should revolt against the catch-phrases 
which make up so large a part of our speech and 
thought. Because she knows the realism of 
European literature, Emmeline grows angry with 



THE SHOW 61 

the stage manager's realism in which we have made 
such notable progress of late. She has refused to 
be impressed by Mr. Belasco's marvelous repro- 
duction of a cheap restaurant, in which the tiled 
walls, the cofFee-urns, the cash-registers, and the 
coat-racks were so unmistakably actual as to 
make a good many of us forget that the action 
which takes place in this restaurant might just as 
well have taken place in the Aquarium or on top 
of the Jungfrau. There was another play. For 
weeks, the author, the producer, and several as- 
sistants (I am now quoting press authority) had 
been searching the city for the exact model of a 
hall bedroom in a theatrical boarding-house such 
as the playwright had in mind. They found what 
they were looking for. When the curtain rose on 
the opening night, the public, duly kept informed 
as to the progress of the quest, naturally rose 
with enthusiasm to the perfect picture of a mean 
chamber in a squalid boarding-house. The scene 
was appalling in its detail of tawdry poverty. 
Except for the fact that the bedroom was about 
sixty feet long, forty feet wide, and fifty feet high, 
the effect of destitution was startling. 

But there is a more dangerous realism. Our 
stage has progressed beyond this actuality of real 
doors with real door-knobs. We have attained as 



62 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

far as the external realism of human types. As 
exhibited on the stage to-day, the shop-girls, the 
" crooks," the detectives, the clerks, the traveling 
salesmen, the shady financiers, are startlingly true 
to life in appearance, in walk, in speech. For that 
one ought presumably to be thankful. Pre- 
sumably it is progress to have shop-girls, clerks, 
financiers, " crooks," and their pursuers, instead 
of Pinero's drawing-room heroines and bounders, 
or Henry Bernstein's highly galvanized boule- 
vardiers. If people with the look of Broadway, 
with the tang and speech of Broadway, walk the 
boards, what more would one have.'' 

" Soul," says Emmeline, and she lashes out at 
the beautifully made puppets on the stage. Ex- 
ternal realism has gone as far as it may, but be- 
neath the surface everything is false. The life of 
these amazingly lifelike figures is false, the story 
is false, the morals and the conclusions are false. 
At bottom it is tawdry melodrama. New tricks of 
the trade have been mastered, but the same crude, 
childish views of life confront us, and the same 
utter lack of that form which is the joy of art. 
The American stage never had an excess of form. 
We have less now than we ever had. 

As I think back over the last few paragraphs I 
find that I may have given an utterly wrong im- 



THE SHOW 63 

pression of how the theater affects Emmeline and 
me. It would be deplorable if the reader should 
get to think that we are high-brows. It is quite 
the other way. Between the acts and at home, 
the two of us may be tremendously critical, but 
while the business of the stage is under way we 
are grateful for the least excuse to yield ourselves 
to the spirit of the thing. Provided, only, there 
is nothing in the play about a young woman who 
beards a king of finance and frightens him into 
surrendering a million dollars' worth of bonds. 
Financiers and their female private secretaries I 
cannot abide. Otherwise, I delight in nearly 
everything: in The Old Homestead, in George M. 
Cohan, in Fanny's First Play, and in the farce- 
comedies where a recreant husband, surprised by 
his wife, steps backward into his own suit-case. 
Emmeline confesses that she has seldom seen a 
proposal of marriage on the stage without want- 
ing to sniffle sympathetically. 

Because I take pleasure in seeing frivolous 
young men step into their own suit-cases I am not 
averse to musical comedy. Emmeline rarely ac- 
companies me ; not because she is afraid that it is 
the kind of a play a man should not take his wife 
to, but because it does not interest her. She is 
fond of Gilbert and Sullivan, and she likes The 



64 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Chocolate Soldier; but of our own native musical 
comedy I think she has seen only one example. 

The play was called The Girl from Grand 
Rapids. The principal characters are an Ameri- 
can millionaire and his daughter who are traveling 
in Switzerland. They come to the little village of 
Sprudelsaltz and are mistaken by the populace 
for the German Kaiser and his Chancellor who 
are expected on a secret mission. The American 
millionaire, in order to outwit a business rival who 
belongs to the Furniture Trust, consents to play 
the part. He accounts for the apparent sex of 
his Chancellor by declaring that the evil designs 
of certain French spies have made it necessary for 
his companion to assume this peculiar disguise. 
The Chancellor falls in love with the young 
British attache, who has come to Switzerland 
for the purpose of unearthing certain important 
secrets relative to the German navy. At their 
first meeting the supposed German Chancellor and 
the British naval attache sing a duet of which the 
refrain is, " Oh, take me back to Bryant Square." 
Ultimately the identity of the pseudo Kaiser and 
his Chancellor is discovered. They are threatened 
by the infuriated Swiss populace in fur jackets 
and tights, and are saved only through the inter- 
vention of a comic Irish waiter named Gansen- 



THE SHOW 65 

Schmidt. They escape from Switzerland and in 
the second act we find them at Etah, in Green- 
land, where the millionaire's daughter is compelled 
to wed an Eskimo chieftain who turns out to be 
the British naval attache in disguise. The third 
act shows an Arab carnival in the Sahara. Re- 
peatedly, in the course of the evening, Emmeline 
asked me why I laughed. 

There is also a business motive in my playgoing. 
I am learning how to build a complicated dramatic 
plot. Years ago I set out to write a play. Like 
all people of slipshod habits I have sudden at- 
tacks of acute systematization, and when I began 
my play, I assigned so much time for working 
out the plot, so much for character-development, 
so much for actually writing the dialogue. The 
scheme did not quite work out. I forget the de- 
tails ; the point is that at the end of a year I had 
written all my dialogue, but had made little prog- 
ress with my character-development and had done 
nothing whatever on my plot. Since that time I 
have moved ahead. My characters are to me 
fairly alive now. But I still have a plot and inci- 
dents to find for my play. Emmeline says that 
my quest is a vain one. She is convinced that I 
have no gift for dramatic complication, and that 
the best I can hope for is to do something like 



fiS EELSHAZZAR C L E T 

B;~i.ri Sr.^Tir, But I rcfii?t to in^e i::. I gt) 

:? f-:: ■ ~ ;--;- —; : .^:": :;■; ::-;:i;. and 

5. ■""'.-: - ■. ■ ' - .'.*''■* -"-^-- ^' skcic- 

:;•• :'■ ■ :: ... y;":5^:;l ^"^ spirited 

r . ' - - . - • - - .^ic : •■ ; ' .:^ -^'-"rh one 



ito ser:: -« ': . ^ ..^-. ..: . . . 5::..:: be- 



tJiL ^.:i. It is a Terr : :. '" ^hich 

tlic sensf of n/.!*:."" •;.'.rr'c'> ov-r i:^.... .... ..jt to 

tiK nest :^.: .i r-..i^::i:: -u :::e faces of the ^-^rc- 

imiors. The i>cTfrrt r -.t. a? I conceive it^ ; 

loeep thi ..-.--:.-■ :% single mood from be- 

gimiiii^ ^: ~ r ::^ fn the fall and the rise of 
ike cnrr rht to hold and show itself 

in a flu.- . - : . : ; . i: : - . "■ .. iravetT, in a feverish 
ciisttcr -R-Hch should cany on the playTRTight's 
~..:r ^ -iitil he resumes the business of his nar- 
ratixe. But as a rule I am not exalted between 
the acts, and I perceive that mv neighbors are not. 
It is not a plav we are watching, but three or four 
separate plays. When the curtain descends we 
lean back into an ordinary world. The business 
of the stage drops from us. We resume conversa- 



TPIE SPIOW 67 

tion interrupted in the Subway. A young woman 
on the left furnishes her companion with details 
of last night's dance. Two young men in front 
argue over the cost of staging the piece. One 
says it cost $10,000, and the other says §15,000, 
and they pull out their favorite evening papers 
from under the seat and quote them to each other. 
Emmeline wonders whether she looked down far 
enough into Harold's throat when he said, 
" Aaa-h-h." 

It is not entirely our own fault if we lose the 
sense of continuous illusion between the acts. 
There is little in the ordinary play to carry one 
forward from one act to the next. We stiU talk 
of suspense and movement and climax, whereas 
our plays are not organic plays at all, but mere 
vaudeville. They do not depend for their effect 
on cumulative interest, but on the individual 
*' punch." Drama, melodrama, comedy, and farce 
have their own laws. But our latest dramatic 
form combines all forms in a swift medley of ef- 
fects that I can describe by no other term than 
vaudeville. George M. Cohan is our representa- 
tive dramatist, not because he has flung the star- 
spangled banner to the breeze, but because he has 
cast all consistency to the winds. Who ever heard 
of a melodramatic farce? Mr. Cohan is writing 



68 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

them all the time. They are plays in which peo- 
ple threaten each other with automatic pistols to 
the accompaniment of remarks which elicit roars 
of laughter. 

I know, of course, that Shakespeare has a 
drunken porter on the stage while Macbeth is do- 
ing Duncan to death. But George M. Cohan is 
different. I have in mind a homeless little village 
heroine of Mr. Cohan's who is about to board a 
train for the great city with its pitfalls and pri- 
vations. Emmeline was quite affected by the 
pathetic little figure on the platform, with the 
shabby suit-case — until six chorus men in beauti- 
fully creased trousers waltzed out on the train 
platform and did a clog-dance and sang, " Good- 
by, Mary, don't forget to come back home." I 
can't conceive Shakespeare doing this sort of 
thing. It is gripping while it lasts, but when the 
curtain falls, one chiefly thinks how late it will be 
before one gets home. 

But if the playwright's story does not always 
hold me, the people on the stage seldom fail to 
bring me under the spell. I am not a professional 
critic and I have no standards of histrionic skill 
to apply. It may be, as people say, that our 
actors are deficient in imagination, in the power 
of emotional utterance, in facial eloquence, in 



THE SHOW 69 

the art of creating illusion. Perhaps it is true 
that they seldom get into the skin of their charac- 
ters, and never are anything but themselves. But 
precisely because they are themselves I like them. 
I like their lithe, clean-cut length, their strong, 
clean-shaven faces, their faultless clothes. I like 
the frequency with which they change from morn- 
ing to evening dress. I like the ease with which 
they order taxicabs, press buttons for the club 
waiter, send out cablegrams to Shanghai, and 
make appointments to meet at expensive road- 
houses which are reached only by automobile. 
The nonchalance with which George M. Cohan's 
people distribute large sums is a quickening 
spectacle to me. 

After this it will be difficult for anyone to ac- 
cuse me of being a high-brow. Let me dispose 
of this matter beyond all doubt. I do not under- 
stand what people mean when they speak of in- 
tellectual actors and the intellectual interpreta- 
tion of stage roles. Possibly it is a defective 
imagination in me which makes me insist that 
actors shall look their part physically. Not all 
the imaginative genius in the world will reconcile 
me to a thin Falstaff, suggestive of vegetarianism 
and total abstinence. I am not even sure that I 
know what an intellectualized Hamlet is. I in- 



70 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sist upon a Hamlet who shall wear black and who 
shall recite slowly the lines which shake me so 
when I read them at home, instead of intellectu- 
ally swallowing the lines as so many do. I cannot 
see how Mrs. Fiske's intellectuality qualifies her 
for playing robust, full-blooded women like Tess, 
or like Cyprienne in Divorgons. But I like Mrs. 
Fiske as Becky Sharpe and as Ibsen's Nora, be- 
cause both were small women. 

I imagine it is a sign of Wagner's genius that 
he made all his women of heroic stature. He must 
have foreseen that by the time a singer has 
learned to interpret Briinhilde she is apt to be 
mature and imposing. Thus I feel; and I know 
that most of the people in the audience agree 
with me. Those who do not have probably read 
in their evening papers that they were about to 
see an intellectual interpretation. Whenever 
they are puzzled by the actor they ascribe it to 
his intellect. 

When the final curtain falls, the play drops 
from us like a discarded cloak. People smile, dress, 
tell each other that it was a pretty good show, 
and hold the door open for the ladies to pass out 
into the glow and snap of Broadway. We do not 
carry illusion away with us from the theater. In 
spite of the fact that we have purchased our 



THE SHOW 71 

tickets in the conviction that every husband and 
wife ought to see the play, we do not correlate 
the theater with life. Primarily it is a show. We 
do not ask much. If it has offered us a hearty 
laugh or two, a thrill, a pressure on the tear- 
ducts, this tolerant American public, this patient, 
innocent, cynical public that is always prepared 
to be cheated, feels grateful; and there ends the 
matter. 

And Aristotle? And the purging of the emo- 
tions through pity and terror? I still remember 
a play called The Diamond Breaker, which I saw 
on Third Avenue when Benjamin Harrison was 
President. I remember how the young mining en- 
gineer was foully beset by his rival and tied hand 
and foot and dropped into the open chute that 
led straight into the pitiless iron teeth of the 
stone-crushing machine. I remember how the 
heroine rushed out upon the gangway and seized 
the young engineer by the hair; and the wheels 
stopped ; and the girl fainted ; and strong men in 
the audience wept. Is it my own fault that such 
sensations are no longer to be had? Or has the 
drama indeed degenerated within these twenty 
years ? 

From the evening papers I gather that the 
crowd, after leaving the new nine-story Black- 



72 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

friars Theater, modeled after the Parthenon at 
Athens, invades and overruns the all-night res- 
taurants on Broadway. Yet the trains in the 
Subway are jammed, and Emmeline has to stand 
more than halfway to Belshazzar Court. 



IV 
THE GAME 



Often I think how monotonous life must be to 
Jerome D. Travers or Francis Ouimet, — com- 
pared, that is, with what life can offer to a player 
of my quality. When Travers drives off, it is a 
question whether the ball will go 245 yards or 260 
yards ; and a difference of fifteen yards is ob- 
viously nothing to thrill over. Whereas, when I 
send the ball from the tee the possible range of 
variation is always 100 yards, running from 155 
down to 55 ; provided, that is, that the ball starts 
at all. To me there is always a freshness of 
surprise in having the club meet the ball, which 
Travers, I dare say, has not experienced in the 
last dozen years. 

With him, of course, it is not sport, but mathe- 
matics. A wooden club will give one result, an 
iron another. The sensation of getting greater 
distance with a putting iron than with a brassie 

73 



74 BELSH A ZZ A R COURT 

is something Ouimet can hardly look forward to. 
Always mathematics, with this kind of swing 
laying the ball fifteen feet on the farther side of the 
hole, and that kind of chop laying it ten feet on 
the nearer side. I have frequently' thought that 
playing off the finals for the golf championship is 
a waste of time. All that is necessary is to call 
in Professor Miinsterberg and have him test 
Travers's blood-pressure and reaction index on 
the morning of the game, and then take " Chick " 
Evans's blood-pressure and reaction index. The 
referee would then award the game to Travers 
or to Evans by £ up and 1 to play, or whatever 
score Professor Miinsterberg's figures would in- 
dicate. 

The true zest of play is for the duffer. When 
he swings club or racket he can never tell what 
miracles of accomplishment or negation it will 
perform. That is not an inanimate instrument 
he holds in his hands, but a living companion, a 
totem comrade whom he is impelled to propitiate, 
as Hiawatha crooned to his arrow before letting 
it fly from the string. And that is why duffers 
are peculiarly qualified to write about games, or 
for that matter, about everything, — literature, 
music, or art, — as the}^ have always done. To be 
sufficiently inexpert in anything is to be filled 



THE GAME 75 

with corresponding awe at the hidden soul in that 
thing. To be sufficiently removed from perfec- 
tion is to worship it. Poets, for example, are 
preeminently the interpreters of life because they 
make such an awful mess of the practice of living. 
And for the same reason poets always retain the 
zest of life — because the poet never knows 
whether his next shot will land him on the green 
or in the sandpit, in Heaven or in the gutter. The 
reader will now be aware that in describing my 
status as a golfer I am not making a suicidal 
confession. On the contrary, I am presenting my 
credentials. 



A great many people have been searching dur- 
ing ever so many years for the religion of democ- 
racy. I believe I have found it. That is, not a 
religion, if by it you mean a system completely 
equipped with creed, formularies, organization, 
home and foreign missions, schisms, an empty- 
church problem, an underpaid-minister's problem, 
a Socialist and I. W. W. problem, and the like ; 
although, if I had the time to pursue my re- 
searches, I might find a parallel to many of these 
things. What I have in mind is a great demo- 
cratic rite, a ceremonial which is solemnized on 



76 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

six days in the week during six months in the 
year by large masses of men with such unfailing 
regularity and such unquestioning good faith that 
I cannot help tliinking of it as essentially a re- 
ligious performance. 

It is a simple ceremonial, but impressive, like 
all manifestations of the soul of a multitude. I 
need only close my eyes to call up the picture 
vividly : It is a day of brilliant sunshine and a 
great crowd of men is seated in the open air, a 
crowd made up of all conditions, ages, races, tem- 
peraments, and states of mind. The crowd has 
sat there an hour or more, while the afternoon 
sun has slanted deeper into the west and the 
shadows have crept across greensward and hard- 
baked clsij to the eastern horizon. Then, almost 
with a single motion, — the time may be some- 
where between four-thirty and five o'clock, — this 
multitude of divers minds and tempers rises to its 
feet and stands silent, while one might count 
twenty perhaps. Nothing is said; no high priest 
intones prayer for this vast congregation ; never- 
theless the impulse of ten thousand hearts is 
obviously focused into a single desire. When 
you have counted twenty the crowd sinks back to 
the benches. A half minute at most and the rite 
is over. 



THE GAME 77 

I am speaking, of course, of the second half of 
the seventh inning, when the home team comes to 
bat. The precise nature of this religious half 
minute depends on the score. If the home team 
holds a safe lead of three or four runs ; if the 
home pitcher continues to show everything, and 
the infield gives no sign of cracking, and the out- 
field isn't bothered by the sun, then I always 
imagine a fervent Te Deum arising from that in- 
articulate multitude, and the peace of a great 
contentment falling over men's spirits as they 
settle back in their seats. If the game is in the 
balance you must imagine the concentration of ten 
thousand wills on the spirit of the nine athletes 
in the field, ten thousand wills telepathically pour- 
ing their energies into the powerful arm of the 
man in the box, into the quick eye of the man on 
first base, and the sense of justice of the umpire. 

But if the outlook for victory is gloomy, the 
rite does not end with the silent prayer I have 
described. As the crowd subsides to the benches 
there arises a chant which I presume harks back 
to the primitive litanies of the Congo forests. 
Voices intone unkind words addressed to the play- 
ers on the other team. Ten thousand voices 
chanting in unison for victory, twenty thousand 
feet stamping confusion to the opposing pitcher 



:s BELSHAZZAK COURT 

— if this is not vorsliip of the most fundamental 
sort, because of the most primitive sort, then 
what is religion? 

Consider the mere number of participants in 
this national rite of the seventh inning. I have 
said a multitude of ten thousand. But if the day 
be Saturday and the place of worship one of the 
big cities of either of the major leagues, the 
crowd may easily be twice as large. And all over 
the country at almost the same moment, exultant 
or hopeful or despairing multitudes are rising to 
their feet. Multiply this number of worshipers by 
six days — or by seven days if you are west of the 
Alleghanies. where Sunday baseball has somehow 
been reconciled with a still vigorous Puritanism 
— ;\::i it is apparent that a continuous wave of 
spiritual ardor sweeps over this continent between 
three-thirty and six p.m. from the middle of April 
to the middle of October. We can only guess at 
the total number of worshipers. The three major 
leagues will account for ^\'e millions. Add the 
minor leagues and the state leagues and the in- 
terorbai! contests — .\::d the total of seventh-in- 
ning - .r.:> arrows overwhelming. Take 
the twenty-five :. ?f voting age in this 
country, assume one visit v . to a baseball 
park in the season, and the result is dazzling. 



THE GAME 79 

It is easifjr to estimate the number of wor- 
shipers than the intensity of the mood. I have 
no gauge for measuring the spiritual fervor which 
exhales on the baseball stadiums of the country 
from mid-April to mid-October, growing in ardor 
with the procession of the months, until it at- 
tains a climax of orgiastic frenzy in the World's 
Series. Foreigners are in the habit of calling this 
an unspiritual nation. But what nation so fre- 
quently tastes — or for that matter has ever 
tasted — the emotional experience of the score 
tied in the ninth inning with the bases full? For- 
eigners call us an unspiritual people because they 
do not know the meaning of a double-header late 
in September — a double-header with two seventh 
innings. 

I began by renouncing any claim to the discov- 
ery of a complete religion of democracy. But 
the temptation to point out parallels is irresistible. 
If Dr. Frazer had not finished with his Golden 
Bough, — or if he is thinking of a supplementary 
volume, — I can see how easily the raw material 
of the sporting columns would shape itself to 
religious forces and systems in his hands. If 
religious ceremonial has its origin in the play in- 
stinct of man, why go back to remote origins like 
the Australian corroboree and neglect Ty Cobb 



80 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

stealing second? If religion has its origin in 
primitive man's worship of the eternal rebirth of 
earth's fructifying powers with the advent of 
spring, how can we neglect the vivid stirring in 
the hearts of millions that marks the departure 
of the teams for spring training in Texas? 

If I were a trained professional sociologist in- 
stead of a mere spectator at the Polo Grounds, it 
seems to me that I should have little trouble in 
tracing the history of the game several thousand 
years back of its commonly accepted origin some- 
where about 1830. I could easily trace back the 
catcher's mask to the mask worn by the medicine- 
man among the Swahili of the West Coast. The 
three bases and home-plate would easily be the 
points of the compass, going straight back to 
the sun mj'th. Murray pulling down a fl}^ in left 
field would hark back straight to Zoroaster and 
the sun-worshipers. Millions of primitive hunters 
must have anointed, and prayed to, their weapons 
before Jeff Tesreau addressed his invocation to 
the spit ball; and when Mathewson winds himself 
up for delivering the ball, he is not far removed 
from the sacred warrior dancer of Polynesia. If 
only I were a sociologist ! 

An ideal faith, this religion of baseball, the 
more you examine it. See, for instance, how it 



THE GAME 81 

satisfies the prime requirement of a true faith that 
it shall ever be present in the hearts of the faith- 
ful ; practiced not once a week on Sunday, but six 
times a week — and in the West seven times a 
week ; professed not only in the appointed place 
of worship, but in the Subway before the game, 
and in the Subway after the game, and in the 
offices and shops and factories on rainy days. If 
a true religion is that for which a man will give 
up wife and children and forget the call of meat 
and drink, what shall we say of baseball? If a 
true religion is not dependent on aesthetic trap- 
pings, but voices itself under the open sky and 
among the furniture of common life, this is again 
the true religion. The stadium lies open to the 
sun, the rain, and the wind. The mystic sense is 
not stimulated by Gothic roof-traceries and the 
dimmed light of stained-glass windows. The con- 
gregation rises from wooden benches on a con- 
crete flooring ; it stands in the full light of a sum- 
mer afternoon and lets its eyes rest on walls of 
bill-boards reminiscent of familiar things, — linen 
collars, table-waters, tobacco, safety-razors. 
Surely w^e have here a clear, dry, real religion of 
the kind that Bernard Shaw would approve. 

I have said quite enough on this point. Other- 
wise I should take time to show how this national 



82 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

faith has created its own architecture, as all great 
religions have done. Our national contribution 
to the building arts has so far been confined to 
two forms — the skyscraper and the baseball 
stadium, corresponding precisely to the two great 
religions of business and of play. I know that the 
Greeks and Romans had amphitheaters, and that 
the word stadium is not of native origin. But 
between the Coliseum and the baseball park there 
is all the difference that lies between imperialism 
and democracy. The ancient amphitheaters were 
built as much for monuments as for playgrounds. 
Consequently they were impressed with an aesthetic 
character which is totally repugnant to our idea 
of a baseball park. 

There is no spiritual resemblance between Ves- 
pasian's amphitheater with its stone and marble, 
its galleries and imperial tribunes, its purple 
canvases stretched out against the sun — and our 
own Polo Grounds. Iron girders, green wooden 
benches, and a back fence frescoed with safety- 
razors and ready-made clothing — what more would 
a modern man have.^* The ancient amphitheaters 
were built for slaves who had to be flattered and 
amused by pretty things. The baseball park is 
for freemen who pay for their pleasures and can 
afford the ugliest that money can buy. 



THE GAME 83 

m 

The art of keeping my eye on the ball is some- 
thing I no longer have hope of mastering. If I 
fail to watch the ball it is because I am continu- 
ally watching faces about me. The same habit 
pursues me on the street and in all public places 
— usually with unpleasant consequences, though 
now and then I have the reward of catching the 
reflection of a great event or a tense moment in 
the face of the man next to me. Then, indeed, I 
am repaid; but it is a procedure fatal to the 
scientific pursuit of baseball. While I am hunt- 
ing in the face of the man next to me for the re- 
flection of Doyle's stinging single between first and 
second base, I hear a roar and turn to find that 
something dramatic has happened at third, and a 
stout young man in a green hat behind me says 
that the runner was out by a yard and should be 
benched for trying to spike the man on the bag. 

The eagle vision of the stout young man behind 
me always fills me with amazement and envy. I 
concede his superior knowledge of the game. He 
knows every man on the field by his walk. He 
recalls under what circumstances the identical 
play was pulled off three years ago in Philadel- 
phia. He knows beforehand just at what moment 



84 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Mr. McGraw will take his left fielder out of the 
game and send in a " pinch hitter." Long years 
of steady application will no doubt supply this 
kind of post-graduate expertship. But when it 
is a question not of theory but of a simple, con- 
crete play which I did happen to be watching 
carefully, how is it that the man behind me can 
see that the runner was out by a yard and had 
nearly spiked the man on the bag, whereas all I 
can see is a tangle of legs and arms and a cloud 
of dust? My eyesight is normal; how do€s my 
neighbor manage to see all that he does as quickly 
as he does? 

The answer is that he does not see. When he 
declares that the runner was out by a yard, and 
I turn around and regard him with envy, it is a 
comfort to have the umpire decide that the runner 
was safe after all. It is a comfort to hear the 
man behind me say that the ball cut the plate 
squarely, and to have the umpire call it a ball. It 
shakes my faith somewhat in human nature, but 
it strengthens my self-confidence. Yet it fails to 
shake the self-confidence of the man behind me. 
When I turn about to see his crestfallen face, I 
find him chewing peanut-brittle in a state of su- 
preme calm, and as I stare at him, fascinated by 
such peace of mind in the face of discomfiture, I 



THE GAME 85 

hear a yell and turn to find the third baseman 
and all the outfield congregated near the left 
bleachers. I have made a psychological observa- 
tion, but have missed the beginning of a double 
play. 

My chagrin is temporary. As the game goes 
on my self-confidence grows enormously. I am 
awakening to the fact that the man behind me 
knows as little about the game as I do. When 
the pitcher of the visiting team delivered the first 
ball of the first inning, the man behind me re- 
marked that the pitcher didn't have anything. 
My neighbor could tell by the pitcher's arm ac- 
tion that he was stale, and he recalled that the 
pitcher in question never did last more than half 
a game. This declaration of absolute belief did 
not stand in the way of a contradictory remark, 
made some time in the fifth inning, with our team 
held so far to two scratch hits. The stout young 
man behind me then said that the visiting pitcher 
was a wonder, that he had everything, that he 
would keep on fanning them till the cows came 
home, and that he was, in fact, the best southpaw 
in both leagues, having once struck out eight men 
in an eleven-inning game at Boston. 

When a man gives vent to such obviously irrec- 
oncilable statements in less than five innings, it 



86 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

is inevitable that I should turn in my seat to get 
a square look at him. But I still find him calm 
and eating peanut-brittle; and as I stare at him 
and try to classify him, the man at the bat does 
something which brings half the crowd to its feet. 
By dint of much inquiry I discover that he has 
rolled a slow grounder to third and has made his 
base on it. Decidedly, psychology and baseball 
will not mix. 

I suppose the stout young man behind me is a 
Fan, — provided there is really such a type. My 
own belief is that the Fan, as the baseball writers 
and cartoonists have depicted him, is a very rare 
thing. To the extent that he does exist he is the 
creation, not of the baseball diamond, but of the 
sporting writer and the comic artist. The Fan 
models himself consciously upon the type set be- 
fore him in his favorite newspaper. It is once 
more a case of nature imitating art. If Mr. Gib- 
son, many years ago, had not drawn a picture of 
fat men in shirt-sleeves, perspiring freely and 
waving straw hats, the newspaper artist would 
not have imitated Mr. Gibson, and the baseball 
audience would not have imitated the newspapers. 
It is true that I have seen baseball crowds in 
frenzy; but these have been isolated moments of 
high tension when all of us have been brought to 



THEGAME 87 

our feet with loud explosions of joy or agony. 
But the perspiring, ululant Fan in shirt-sleeves, 
ceaselessly waving his straw hat, uttering impre- 
cations on the enemy, his enthusiasm obviously 
aroused by stimulants preceding his arrival at 
the baseball park, is far from being representative 
of the baseball crowd. 

The spirit of the audience is best expressed in 
quite a different sort of person. He is always 
to be seen at the Polo Grounds, and when I think 
of baseball audiences it is he who rises before me, 
to the exclusion of his fat, perspiring brother with 
the straw hat. He is young, tall, slender, wears 
blue serge, and even on very cool days in the early 
spring he goes without an overcoat. He sits out 
the game with folded arms, very erect, thin-lipped, 
and with the break of a smile around the eyes. 
He is usually alone, and has little to say. He is 
not a snob; he will respond to his neighbor's com- 
ments in moments of exceptional emotional stress, 
but he does not wear his heart on his sleeve. 

I imagine him sitting, in very much the same 
attitude, in college lecture-rooms, or taking in- 
structions from the head of the office. Complete 
absorption under complete control — he fascinates 
me. While the stout young man behind me chat- 
ters on for his own gratification, forgetting one 



88 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

moment what he said the moment before, — an 
empty-headed young man with a tendency to pro- 
fanity as the game goes on, — this other trim 
young figure in blue serge, with folded arms, sits 
immobile, watching, watching with a calm that 
must come out of real knowledge and experi- 
ence, enjoying the thing immensely, but giv- 
ing no other sign than a sharper glint of 
the eye, a slight opening of the lips. In a mo- 
ment of crisis, being only human, he rises with 
the rest of us, but deliberately, to follow the course 
of a high fly down the foul line far toward the 
bleachers. When the ball is caught he smiles and 
sits down and folds his arms. I envy him his 
capacity for drinking in enjoyment without dis- 
play. This is the kind of Fan I should like to be. 



IV 



Does my thin-lipped friend in blue serge read 
the sporting page? I wonder. My own opinion 
is that he does not, except to glance through the 
box-score. It is for the other man, I imagine, the 
stout young man behind me who detected from 
the first ball thrown that the pitcher's arm was 
no good, and who later identified him as the best 
southpaw in the two leagues, that the sporting 



THE GAME 89 

page with its humor, its philosophy, its art, and 
its poetry, is edited. The sporting page has long 
ceased to be a mere chronicle of sport and has 
become an encyclopaedia, an anthology, a five-foot 
book-shelf, a little university in itself. The life 
mirrored in the pictures on the sporting page is 
not restricted to the prize-ring and the diamond, 
though the language of the prize-ring and the 
baseball field is its vernacular. The art of the 
sporting page has expanded beyond the narrow 
field of play to life itself, viewed as play. 

The line of development is plain: from pictures 
of the Fan at the game the advance has been to 
pictures of the Fan at home, and so on to his 
wife and his young, and his Weltanschauung, until 
now the artist frequently casts aside all pretense 
of painting sport and draws pictures of humanity. 
The sporting cartoon has become a social 
chronicle. It is still found on the sporting page; 
partly, I suppose, because it originated there, 
partly because there is no other place in the paper 
where it can get so wide an audience. It entraps 
the man in the street who comes to read base- 
ball and remains to study contemporary life — 
in violent, exaggerated form, but life none the 
less. 

Even poetry. Sporting columns to-day run 



90 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

heavily to verse. Here, as well as in the pictures, 
there has been an evolution. From the mere 
rhymed chronicle of what happened to Christy 
Mathewson we have passed on to generalized re- 
flections on life, expressed, of course, in terms of 
the game. Kipling has been the great model. His 
lilt and his " punch " are so admirably adapted 
to the theme and the audience. How many thou- 
sand parodies of " Danny Deever " and " The 
Vampire" have the sporting editors printed? I 
should hesitate to say. But Kipling and his 
younger imitators, with Henley's " Invictus " and 
" When I was a King in Babylon," and the late 
Langdon Smith's " Evolution " : " When I was a 
Tadpole and You were a Fish " — have become the 
patterns for a vast popular poetry which deals in 
the main with the red-blooded virtues, — grit, good 
humor, and clean hitting, — but which drops with 
surprising frequency for an optimist race into 
the mood of Ecclesiastes : — 

Demon of Slow and of Fast Ones, 
Monarch of Moisture and Smoke, 
Who made Wagner swing at Anyoldthing, 
And Baker look like a Joke. 

And the writer goes on to remind the former 
king of the boxmen that sooner or later " Old 



THE GAME 91 

Pop " Tempus asks for waivers on the best of us, 
and that Matty and Johnson must in due time 
make way for 

Youngsters with pep from the Texas Steppe — 
The Minors wait for us all. 

Yes, you prince of batsmen, who amidst the 
bleachers' roar, 

Strolled to the plate with your T. Cobb gait, 
Hitting .364>— 

alas. Old Pop Tempus has had his way with you, 
too: — 

Your Average now is Rancid 

And the Pellet you used to maul 

In Nineteen O Two has the Sign on you — 

The Minors wait for us all. 

Not that it matters, of course. The point is to 
keep on smiling and unafraid in Bushville as un- 
der the Main Tent, always doing one's best. 

To swing at the Pill with right good will, 
Hitting .164. 

This is evidently something more than a sport- 
ing page. This is a cosmology. 



92 BELSHAZZAR COURT 



Will those gentlemen who are in the habit of 
sneering at professional baseball kindly explain 
why it is precisely the professional game which 
has inspired the newspaper poets? Personally I 
like professional baseball, and for the very rea- 
sons why so many persons profess to dislike it. 
The game is played for money by men who play 
all the time. They would rather win than lose, 
but they are not devoured by the passion for vic- 
tory. They will play with equal zest for Chicago 
to-day and for Boston to-morrow. But when you 
say all this you are really asserting what I have 
discovered to be a fact, — unless Mr. G. K. Ches- 
terton has discovered it before me, — that only in 
professional sport does the true amateur spirit 
survive. 

By the amateur spirit I mean the spirit which 
places the game above the victory; which takes 
joy, though it may be a subdued joy, in the per- 
fect coordination of mind and muscle and nerve; 
which plays to win because victory is the best 
available test of ability, but which is all the time 
aware that life has other interests than the stand- 
ing of the clubs and the Golf Committee's official 
handicap. I contend that the man who plays to 



THE GAME 93 

live is a better amateur than the man who lives to 
play. I am not thinking now of the actual amount 
of time one gives to the game, though even then 
it might be shown that Mr. Walter J. Travis de- 
votes more hours to golf than Mr. Mathewson 
devotes to baseball. I am thinking rather of the 
adjustment of the game to the general scheme of 
life. It seems to be pretty well established that 
when your ordinary amateur takes up golf he 
deteriorates as a citizen, a husband and father; 
but I cannot imagine Mr. Walter Johnson neg- 
lecting his family in his passion for baseball. As 
between the two, where do you find the true 
amateur spirit? 

I insist. Professional baseball lacks the pic- 
turesque and stimulating accessories of an inter- 
collegiate game — the age-old rivalries, the mus- 
tering of the classes, the colors, the pretty 
women, the cheering carried on by young leaders 
to the verge of apoplexy. But after all, why this 
Saturnalia of pumped-up emotion over the win- 
ning of a game? The winning, it will be ob- 
served, and not the playing. Compared with 
such an exhibition of the lust for victory, a pro- 
fessional game, with its emphasis on the perform- 
ance and not on the result, comes much nearer to 
the true heart of the play instinct. An old topic 



94 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

this, and a perilous one. Before I know it I shall 
be advocating the obsolete standards of English 
sport, which would naturally appeal to a duffer. 
Well, I will take the consequences and boldly as- 
sert that there is such a thing as playing too 
keenly, — even when playing with perfect fairness, 
— such a thing as bucking the line too hard. 

It is distortion of life values. After all, there 
are things worth breaking your heart to achieve 
and others that are not worth while. Francis 
Ouimet's victory over Vardon and Ray is some- 
thing we are justly proud of; not so much as a 
display of golf, but as a display of our unrivaled 
capacity for rallying all the forces of one's being 
to the needs of the moment ; for its display of 
that grit and nerve on which our civilization has 
been built so largely. Only observe, Ouimet's 
victory was magnificent, but it was not play. It 
was fought in the fierce spirit of the struggle for 
existence which it is the purpose of play to make 
us forget. It was Homeric, but who wants base- 
ball or tennis or golf to be Homeric? Herbert 
Spencer was not merely petulant when he said 
that to play billiards perfectly argued a misspent 
life. He stated a profound truth. To play as 
Ouimet did against Vardon and Ray argues a 
distortion of the values of life. What shall it 



THE GAME 95 

profit us if we win games and lose our sense of 
the proportion of things? It is immoral. 

I think Maurice McLoughlin's hurricane serv- 
ice is immoral. I confess that when McLoughlin 
soars up from the base line like a combination 
Mercury and Thor, and pours the entire strength 
of his lithe, magnificent body through the racket 
into the ball, it is as beautiful a sight as any of 
the Greek sculptors have left us. But I cannot 
share the crowd's delight when McLoughlin's op- 
ponent stands helpless before that hurtling, twist- 
ing missile of fate. What satisfaction is there in 
developing a tennis service which nobody can re- 
turn? The natural advantage which the rules of 
the game confer on the server ceases to be an 
advantage and becomes merely a triumph of ma- 
chinery, even if it is human machinery. A game 
of tennis which is won on aces is opposed to the 
very spirit of play. As a matter of fact, the 
crowd admits this when it applauds a sharp rally 
over the net, for then it is rejoicing in play, 
whereas applause for an ace is simply joy in win- 
ning. I repeat: McLoughlin making one of his 
magnificent kills on the return is play ; McLough- 
lin shooting his unreturnable service from the back 
line is merely a scientific engineer — and nothing 
is more immoral than scientific management, es- 



96 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

pecially when applied to anything really worth 
while in life. Incidentally, a change in the rules 
of tennis seems unavoidable. The ball, instead 
of being handed over to McLoughlin for sure de- 
struction, will have to be thrown into the court by 
the umpire, as in polo. 



VI 

You will now see why I am so much drawn to 
the slender young man in blue serge who sits with 
folded arms and only smiles when Mr. Doyle is 
caught napping on first. It is because I am con- 
vinced that he sees the game as it ought to be seen, 
— with an intense sympathy and understanding, 
but, after all, with a sense of humor which recog- 
nizes that a great world lies outside the Polo 
Grounds. You would not think that such a world 
existed from the way in which the stout young 
man behind me has been carrying on. It will be 
recalled that he began by instantly discovering 
that the visiting pitcher's arm was no good. This 
discovery he had modified by the end of the fourth 
inning to the extent that the visiting pitcher now 
had everything. At the beginning of the ninth 
inning this revised opinion still held good. The 
score was 2 to against the home team, and the 



THE GAME 97 

stout young man got up in disgust, remarking 
that he had no use for a bunch of cripples who 
presumed to go up against a real team. 

But he did not go home. He hovered in the 
aisle, and when the home team, in the second half 
of the ninth, bunched four hits and won the game, 
the stout young man hurled himself down the 
aisle and out upon the field, shrieking madly. 
But the thin young man in blue serge got to his 
feet, smiled, made some observation to his neigh- 
bor in an undertone, which I failed to catch, and 
walked away. 



NIGHT LIFE 

The sun heaves up from its sleeping-place 
somewhere in the vicinity of Flatbush, an ex- 
tremely early riser, like most suburban residents, 
and loses no time in setting out upward and west- 
ward to its place of business over Manhattan. 
But the sun is not the first comer there. Its 
earliest rays surprise an army at work. 
Creatures of the night, they cower and dissolve in 
the oncoming of the light. The yellow glare of 
their oil torches and the ghastly violet-blue of 
their vacuum tubes pale, flicker, and go out be- 
fore the onrush of dawn. It is amazing how a 
great city can snore with equanimity while entire 
regiments and squadrons carry on operations in 
the streets, quietly but with no attempt at con- 
cealment, under the very eyes of the police with 
whom, in fact, they seem to have a complete un- 
derstanding. No political revolutions in the name 
of good citizenship, no shifting of Commission- 
ers and Inspectors and Captains, can conceivably 

. 98 



NIGHT LIFE 99 

destroy the entente cordiale between the police 
and these workers in the dark. If anything, the 
patrolman will stop in his rounds to watch their 
maneuvers with an eye of amicable appraisal, and 
when they begin to scatter with the dawn from 
their places of congregation he speeds them on 
their way with a word of cheer. 

And the great city sleeps, its pulse scarcely dis- 
turbed by the feverish activity of the army of 
darkness. Or if the city catches a rumble of their 
movements and stirs in its slumber, it is only to 
turn over and go to sleep again. No hypnotic 
spell will account for this indifference of a city of 
five millions to the presence of an army in its gas- 
lit streets. It is merely habit. If here and there 
in the cubical hives where New York takes its rest 
an unquiet sleeper tosses in his bed and resents the 
disturbance, it is not to wish that these prowlers 
of the night were caught and sent to jail, but 
only to wish that they went about their business 
more discreetly — this great host of marketmen, 
grocers, butchers, milkmen, push-cart engineers, 
and news vendors who have been engaged since 
soon after midnight in the enormous task of pre- 
paring the city's breakfast. 

For this, of course, is the real night life of New 
York — the life that beats at rapid pace in the 



100 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

great water-front markets, in the newspaper 
press-rooms around Brooklyn Bridge, under the 
acetylene glare over excavations for the new 
Subways, and in the thousand bakery shops that 
line the avenues and streets. This is the Under- 
world of which we speak so little because it is a 
real underworld. It is not made up of subter- 
ranean galleries and shafts inhabited by a race 
engaged in undermining the upper world. It is 
a true Underworld on which the upper world of 
the daylight hours is grounded. The foundations 
of society run down into the night where the city's 
food, the city's ways of communication, and the 
city's news are being made ready and garnished 
for the full roar of the day's life. Compared 
with these workers of the dark the operations 
of the housebreaker and his sister of the shadowy 
sidewalks sink into insignificance. It is but a turn 
of the hand for the army of the laborious Under- 
world to undo the mischief which the outlaws of 
the night have performed. Between one and five 
in the morning they create ten thousand times the 
wealth which it is in the power of the jail-bird to 
destroy. 

The point fascinates me. We need urgently a 
vindication of the night, and especially of night 
in the city. Occasionally, it is true, we pay lip 



NIGHT LIFE 101 

service to Night as the kindly nurse that brings 
rest to the fevered brow and forgetfulness to the 
uneasy conscience. But at heart we think of the 
things of night as of things of evil. It would pay 
to set to work a commission of moralists, economic 
experts and statisticians, at striking a balance be- 
tween the good and evil that are done in the night 
and the day. Personally I have no doubt at all 
as to which way the figures would point. It is 
only a question of how far the day is behind the 
night in its net contribution to the welfare of 
humanity. Against night in Greater New York 
you would have to debit, say, half a hundred 
burglaries and highway assaults, a handful of 
fires, a handful of joy-ride fatalities, much 
gambling and debauchery, and possibly some of 
the latest plays on Broadway. But from the 
monetary point of view the wastage and pilfer- 
ings of the night are a trifle compared to what an 
active quarter of an hour may show in Wall 
Street after ten in the morning. And as for the 
moral laxities of the dark it depends on what you 
call immorality. Greater harm to the fiber of 
the race may be wrought during the day by the 
intrigues of unscrupulous business, by factory 
fire-traps, by sweat-shops, by the manipulators of 
our political democracy, than by all the gambling 



102 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

houses and dives in the Tenderloin. After all, the 
railroad-wrecking financiers, the get-rich-quick 
promoters, the builders of jerry tenements, the 
bank looters, bosses, and ward heelers suspend 
their labors at night. 

No ; the more you think of it the more you will 
be persuaded that night is primarily the time of 
the innocent industries, and for the most part 
the primitive industries, employing simple, inno- 
cent, primitive men — slow-speaking truck farmers, 
husky red-faced slaughterers in the abattoirs, 
solid German bakers, and milkmen. The milkman 
alone is enough to redeem the night from its un- 
deserved evil reputation. A cartload of pasteur- 
ized milk for nurslings at four o'clock in the 
morning represents more service to civilization 
than a cartful of bullion on its way from the Sub- 
treasury to the vaults of a national bank five hours 
later. 

I am, of course, not thinking now of the 
early part of the night on Broadway, which is 
only the bedraggled fringe of day, but of the later 
half of night which is the fresh anticipation of 
the dawn. In the still coolness before daybreak 
the interests of the city come down to human es- 
sentials. The commodities dealt in are those that 
men bought and sold tens of thousands of years 



NIGHT LIFE 103 

before they trafficked in safety-razors and Bra- 
zilian diamonds. The dealers of the night are 
concerned with bread, flesh, milk, butter, cheese, 
fruits, and the green offerings of the fields. Con- 
tact with these things cannot but keep the soul 
clean. There is a fortune for the nerve specialist 
who will first advise his patients to rise at 
three in the morning and walk a mile between the 
rows of wagons and stalls in Gansevoort or 
Wallabout Market and draw strength from the 
piles of sweet green produce dewy under the lamp- 
light, and learn patience from the farmer's horsesj 
and observe that even men in their chafferings 
can be subdued to the innocent medium in which 
they traffic. 

To be sure there are the newspaper men. I 
have always assumed that it is primarily for them 
the churches in the lower part of the city offer 
special services for night-workers. If any class 
of night-workers stands in need of prayer it must 
be the men of my own profession, surely the least 
innocent of all legitimate trades that are plied 
after midnight. But as I think of it, even among 
newspaper men it is the comparatively unspoiled 
and innocent who work after midnight, members 
of the lobster squad left on emergency duty, cubs 
who have not lost all the freshness of the little 



104 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

towns in the Middle West and the South, the men 
on the linotype machines, the men sweating in 
the press-rooms, and the short, squat unshaven 
men who stagger under enormous bundles of 
newspapers to the cars and the elevated trains. 
Here, too, night has exercised its cleansing selec- 
tive effect. The big men of the press, the shrewd 
manipulators of newspaper policy, the editorial 
pleaders of doubtful causes, the city editors with 
insistence on the " punch " as against the fact, 
the Titans of the advertising columns, have all 
gone home before midnight. As I think of it, the 
only unrespectable members of the newspaper pro- 
fession that work at 2 a.m. are the writers of 
the Extra Special afternoon editions for the next 
day. Let us hope that they take advantage of 
the churches' standing offer of special services 
and prayer for night-workers. 

When you stroll through the markets, between 
rows of wagons, stalls, crates, baskets, and squads 
of perspiring men, you need not force the imagi- 
nation to call up the solid square miles of brick 
and stone barracks in which New York's five 
million, minus some thousands, are asleep, out- 
side the glare of the arc lights and kerosene 
torches. You can tell Hercules from his foot and 
you can tell New York from the size of its maw, 



NIGHT LIFE 105 

of which a single day's filling keeps these thou- 
sands of men at work. There it sleeps, the big, 
dark brute, and in another three hours it 
will yawn and sit up and blink its eyes and roar 
for its food. The markets are only the spots of 
highest activity in the business of providing fod- 
der for the creature. Turn out of the crush of 
Gansevoort Market and walk south through 
Washington Street and Greenwich Street and 
Hudson Street, a good mile and a half south 
through silent warehouses all crammed with food, 
a solid square mile of provender. The contents 
of these grim weather-beaten storehouses are 
open to appraisal by the mere sense of smell as 
you pass through successive strata of coffee, and 
sugar, and tea, and spices, and green vegetables, 
and fruits. If you are sufficiently educated you 
may detect the individual species within the genus, 
discern where the pepper merges into cloves, and 
the heavy odor of banana into the acid aroma 
of the citrus. It seems almost indecent, this vast 
debauch of gluttony, this great area given up 
to the most elemental of the appetites, this Ten- 
derloin of the stomach, until you once more recall 
the five million individual cells of the animal that 
will soon have to be fed. 

The markets and the warehouses are not the 



106 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

belly of the city, as Zola has called them in his 
own Paris. The digestive processes of a great 
city are worked out later and in a million homes. 
The markets are the heart of the city, pumping 
the life-fuel to themselves from across the rivers 
and the seas, and pumping them out again by 
drayloads and cartloads through the avenues and 
streets. In the late afternoon of the day before, 
everywhere on the circumference of the city, you 
have come across the driblets and streamlets of 
nourishment which the markets suck to them- 
selves. In Jersey, in Long Island, and in West- 
chester you encounter, toward nightfall, heavy 
farm-wagons of exactly the prairie-schooner type 
that you first met in the school histories, plodding 
on toward the ferries and the bridges, the drivers 
nodding over the reins, the horses philosoph- 
ically conscious of the long hours as well as the 
long miles ahead of them. Taken one by one, 
these farmer's wagons moving at two miles an 
hour seem pitifully inadequate to the appetites 
and imperious demands of a metropolis. But they 
are only the unquestioning units in the great 
mobilization of the army of food providers. Their 
cubic contents and their rate of progress have 
been accurately estimated by the Von Moltkes of 
the provision markets. At the appointed time 



NIGHT LIFE 107 

they will drop into their appointed place, form- 
ing by companies and squadrons into hollow 
squares for the daily encounter with human- 
ity's oldest and most indefatigable foe — hunger. 

The markets on the water-front are the heart 
of the city's night life, but in all the five boroughs 
there are local centers of concentrated vitality — 
the milk depots, the street-railway junctions, the 
car barns. Where Elevated or Subway meets with 
Crosstown and longitudinal surface lines you 
will find at three in the morning as active and 
garishly illuminated a civic center as many a city 
of the hinterland would boast of at nine o'clock 
in the evening. Groups of switchmen, car dis- 
patchers, conductors, motormen, and the casual 
onlooker whom New York supplies from its inex- 
haustible womb even at three in the morning, stand 
in the middle of the road and discuss the most 
wonderful mysteries — so it seems at least in the 
hush before dawn. And because the cars which 
they switch and side track and dispatch on their 
way depart empty of passengers and lose them- 
selves in the shadows, their business, too, seems 
one of impressive mystery. 

A car conductor at three o'clock in the morn- 
ing is the most delightful of people to meet. His 
hands are not yet grimy with the filth of alien 



108 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

nickels and dimes. His temper is as yet unworn 
with the day's traffic. In the beneficent cool of 
the night his thwarted social instincts unfold. If 
you share the rear platform with him, which you 
will do as a rule, he will accept your fare with a 
deprecating smile as money passes between gen- 
tlemen who stoop to the painful necessity but take 
no notice of it. Having registered your fare, he 
will engage you in conversation, and it is amaz- 
ing how the harassed soul of the car conductor is 
open to the ideas and forces that rule the great 
world. If you are timid with conductors and 
take your way into the car after paying your 
fare, he will make a pretense of business with the 
motorman and, coming back, he will find a remark 
to draw you out of your surliness or your timid- 
ity. He may even sit down next to you and after 
five minutes you will be cursing the mechanical 
necessity of the daylight life which takes this 
eminently human creature and turns him into a 
bundle of rasping hurry and incivility. If a visit 
to the markets is a good cure for neurosis, a trip 
down Amsterdam Avenue in a surface car at three 
A.M. is a splendid tonic for democracy. 

And once more food. For the men who labor in 
the night, primarily for the city's breakfast, must 
themselves be fed. Clustered around the markets, 



NIGHT LIFE 109 

and around the railway junctions and car barns, 
are the brilliantly illuminated Shanleys and Del- 
monicos of the industrious Underworld. What 
places of warm cheer they are, on a winter night, 
these long rows of Lunches, whose names are a 
perpetual lesson in the national geography — 
Baltimore Lunch, Hartford Lunch, Washington 
Lunch, New Orleans and Memphis and Utica and 
Milwaukee Lunches. They all have tiled floors 
and white walls and spacious arm-chairs with a 
table extension like the chairs in which we used 
to write examination papers at college. In the 
rear of the room is the counter supporting the 
great silver cofFee-urn. The placards on the 
walls reek with plenty. You wonder how the re- 
sources of an establishment operating on an aver- 
age level of fifteen cents the meal can supply the 
promised bounty — sirloins and small steaks, and 
shellfish out of season and all the delicacies of the 
griddle and the casserole ; — only the prudent con- 
sumer will concentrate on the coffee and dough- 
nuts. The rarities are to be had, if you insist, 
and who would quarrel with the quality of a sir- 
loin steak selling for twenty cents with bread, 
butter, and coffee, at three in the morning? But 
it is better to ask for coffee and doughnuts. 
An affable humanism permeates the Baltimore 



110 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Lunch. The proprietor, the chef, the waiter, and 
the cashier will come forward to meet you and 
exchange a word or two with you as he wipes up 
the arm-table. He will take your order, and go- 
ing behind the counter, will deliver it to himself. 
If you are extravagant and ask for meats, he will 
disappear into some sort of cupboard, which is a 
kitchen, and pleasant pungent odors will precede 
his reappearance. He will punch your check as 
a protection against malfeasance by the waiter 
and he will ring up your payment on the cash- 
register as a protection against malfeasance on 
the part of the cashier. If your manners permit 
he will come forward and watch you while you 
eat, not with the affected paternal mien of the 
head waiter at the Waldorf, but as a brother, a 
democrat, and a chef who has presided over your 
food from the first moment till the last and is 
qualified to take an intimate interest in its ulti- 
mate disposal. He is generous with the butter, 
and as a rule he is indifferent to tips. 

Can I do you justice, oh Baltimore Lunchman 
of the Gay White Way in the vicinity of Broad- 
way and Manhattan Streets, where the enormous 
black iron span of the Subway viaduct casts its 
shadow over all the cars that run west to Fort 
Lee and north to Fort George and south into the 



NIGHT LIFE 111 

deserted regions of lower Broadway? Your nap- 
kins unquestionably were white once upon a time, 
and your apron is but so-so, but your heart is in 
the right place, and consequently your manners 
are perfect. On you, too, the night has exercised 
its cleansing effect, wiping out commercialism and 
leaving behind the instinct for service. You ac- 
cept my money, but only that you may have the 
means to go on feeding the useful toilers of the 
night and occasional castaways like myself. The 
spirit of profit does not lurk under your flaring 
arc lights ; where is the profit in sirloin steak with 
bread, butter, and coff*ee at twenty cents? You 
are not a trafficker in food, but a minister to 
human needs, almost as disinterested as the dogs 
of St. Bernard, of whom, if you don't mind my 
saying so, you strongly remind me, with your 
solid bulk and great shock of hair and the two 
days' beard and your strangely unmanicured 
fingers. You do not cater to the pampered palate 
of the rich, which lusts for strange plants and 
strange animals and strange liquids to devour. 
Your sizzling coffee is nectar in the veins of big 
men who run in on winter nights stamping their 
feet and smiting their palms stiff from the icy 
brake-handle and switching-lever — the simple, in- 
nocent toilers of the night. Occasionally your 



112 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

walls resound to the gayetj of young voices and 
your arc lights glow on the shimmer of linen and 
silks which put your regular customers somewhat 
out of countenance, as when a troop of young 
men and girls after loitering wickedly at the dance 
seek refuge with you while waiting for a car. 
They taste your coffee and nibble at your dough- 
nuts for a lark. So they say. It is pretense. 
They do not nibble, they do not taste ; they eat 
and drink with undeniable relish the rough, un- 
familiar fare. After five hours' exercise on the 
dancing floor and a ten minutes' wait on a wintry 
corner there is an electric spark in your coff*ee 
and Titan's food in your doughnuts. Motormen, 
draymen, young men and women in dancing 
pumps, what a line of customers is yours ! Oh 
Youth ! Oh Night ! Oh Baltimore Lunchman ! 

The gray of dawn overtakes the armies from the 
markets, the car barns, and the excavation pits 
in full retreat. They scatter in every direction, 
weary, heavy-eyed, but with no sense of defeat in 
their souls. They throng to the river to lose them- 
selves in the mysterious wilds of Jersey. Their 
cavalry and train rumble down empty Broadway to 
South Ferry. They pour eastward toward the 
bridges or hide themselves in the cellars and ram- 
shackle comer booths of the East side. They 



NIGHT LIFE 113 

plunge into the Subway and, stretched out at full 
length in the illuminated spaciousness of the In- 
terborough's cars, they pass off into the sleep 
which falls alike upon the just and the unjust, 
contrary to general supposition. When the day 
breaks it finds their haunting-places deserted or 
given over to small brigades of sweepers and clean- 
ers who make ready for the other kinds of busi- 
ness that are carried on in the full glare of the 
sun. 

Blessed are the meek! While waiting for the 
inheritance of the earth they are already in full 
possession of the glory of the sunrise, which we 
of the comfortable classes know only by hearsay. 
The tremulous milky gray of the firmament fol- 
lowed by the red flush of daylight is reserved in 
New York for the truck farmer from the suburbs, 
the drayman, the food vendors, and the early fac- 
tory hands. For them only is the beauty of New 
York as it heaves up out of the shadows. The 
farmer who has disposed of his wares with ex- 
pedition and is now on his way back to the Jersey 
shore, when he looks back, sees the jagged silhou- 
ette of our towers and massed brick piles like a 
host of negroid Titans plodding northward in re- 
treat. Or if his way is by the Municipal boats to 
Staten Island, he may look back and see a thin 



114 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

shaft of light, ethereal, tremulous, almost of 
faery, and that pillar of light will be Broadway 
canyon between its brick walls still clad in shadow. 
It is given only to the foreign-born ditchers and 
hewers of the crowded lower Bronx, as they 
trudge across the bridges over the Harlem, to see 
before them mighty iron spans flung forward into 
the shadows or to catch the mirrored sweep of 
magic arches lifting up out of the water to link 
themselves to the arch overhead. 

The beauty of New York, rising to meet a new 
day, is for these lowly workers, and for the unfor- 
tunates who stay out in the night not to work, 
but to sleep, because night and the open is their 
only refuge. When the curtain of night rises on 
Riverside and reveals Grant's Tomb in frosty 
vagueness at the end of a green vista, the sight is 
rarely for those who sleep in the expensive 
caravansaries along the Drive, and most often for 
the sleepers on the benches. It is the men who 
sleep on the benches in Morningside Park that are 
the first to wonder at the dark line of poplars 
holding desperate defense against the charging 
line of daylight, and over the poplars the huge, 
squat octagon of St. John's buttressed chapels ; un- 
less the sleepers on the benches are anticipated by 
the angel atop of St. John's greeting the dawn 



NIGHT LIFE 115 

with his trumpet. Because night loiterers are 
excluded from Central Park, I suppose that all its 
awakening loveliness must go for naught. But 
if the first impingement of the sun on the massed 
verdure of the park, on its lakes, its Alpine views, 
its waterfalls, and the fresh, sweet meadows, does 
find a rare spectator, it must be again one of the 
homeless who has eluded police regulations to find 
a night's rest in the great green inclosure. Pos- 
sibly there may be a poet or two wandering about 
in Central Park at dawn, but the poets are early 
risers only in the country. To them the city is 
only the monstrous, noisy machine of the full day. 
That on New York City, too, the sun rises in the 
morning, working its miracles of beauty, seems 
to have escaped the poets ; or else they have es- 
caped me. 

As the sun continues to mount from Flatbush 
towards the East River bridges, the demoraliza- 
tion of the hosts of night-workers grows complete. 
Either they have disappeared or they straggle 
on through isolated streets, mere units, like the 
flotsam of a beaten army. The full light strips 
them of their dignity. As late even as five 
o'clock, the milkman in the quiet streets is a 
symbol and a mystery. By six o'clock he is a 
common purveyor. Contact with frowsy elevator 



116 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

boys and gaping grocer's clerks has vulgarized 
him. His interests are no longer in food, but in 
commerce. Instead of communing with the night, 
he is busy with a memorandum book and a lead 
pencil. 

In the full dawn the acetylene flares over the 
excavation pits have gone out. The dazzling arc 
lights in the Baltimore and Hartford Lunches 
are out. The street cars, running on shorter 
schedules, have taken on their daylight screech 
and clangor. The conductor is fast sinking into 
daylight surliness. The huge bundles of news- 
papers which at night and in bulk have the merit 
of a really great commodity, the dignity almost 
of a bag of meal or a crate of eggs, are now re- 
solved into units on the stationers' stands, and 
if the new day be Sunday the newsman is busy 
sorting out the twelve different sections of the 
Sunday paper and putting the comic section on 
top. Nor can I think of anything in human af- 
fairs which can be more futile in the eyes of a 
Creator than a stationer sorting out comic sup- 
plements in the full glory of early sunrise. With 
its newspaper waiting for it, New York of the 
ordinary life is ready to get out of bed. 



VI 
LAURELMERE IN PEACE AND WAR 



Ten months in the year we sleep, eat, and re- 
ceive our friends in Belshazzar Court. But if 
home is where the heart is, our apartment stands 
vacant seven months of the twelve. With the 
first thrill of the March sunlight come dreams of 
the sea, green fields, the hills, and by the first 
week in April we are planning vacations. The 
spring rains sap and mine at the foundations of 
Belshazzar Court's superheated comfort. Like 
every one of the fifty-three other families who 
have been snuggling together against the winter, 
we feel less need of our neighbors as the days 
grow warmer and we yield to the gentle Welt- 
schmerz which seeks expression in real estate 
catalogues. The hallways in Belshazzar Court 
grow stuffy, the bedrooms shrink and darken, 
and stray conversation from across the court no 
longer wakens the response of human fellowship. 

117 



118 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

In winter Belshazzar Court is an admirable two 
minutes from the Subway, but in April I begin 
to feel that a ten minutes' walk to the train in the 
morning is just what my health requires. To get 
away, away — Weltschmerz, Wanderlust^ or any 
other term of gentle, surging emotion the Kaiser's 
language is so rich in. We go in for real estate 
catalogues, time-tables, commutation fares, and the 
local distribution of malaria and mosquitoes in 
the northeastern United States. 

We go away in July. We come back in Sep- 
tember, but only in the body. It is another four 
weeks before Belshazzar Court becomes home 
again. The apartment shows traces of the paint- 
ers and the paper-hangers. The family wardrobe 
is in transit from trunks to closets. Emmeline 
haunts the employment offices. Harold must be 
fitted out for school. The bedroom distribution 
problem must be settled and cannot be properly 
settled until Harold's bed has been tried out in 
every sleeping-room and brought back to its orig- 
inal place. Not till some time in October does life 
fall back into the compact, steam-heated ways of 
Belshazzar Court. Not till then does the spirit 
rejoin the body and take up its old habitation. 
There ought to be such a thing as spiritual rent, 
payable only during those months when our souls 



LAURELMERE 119 

are at peace in Belshazzar Court. Nobody then 
would want to be a landlord and everyone would 
be happy. 

This summer we decided early against hotels 
and boarding-houses. Emmeline's nerves are not 
equipped for the strain of porch life. The chil- 
dren find the noise rather trying. And the vast 
amount of work which I plan for my summer va- 
cation and which regularly gets postponed to 
Christmas could not conceivably be carried on in 
hotel writing-rooms. We decided then that this 
summer it must be a place of our own in the 
country, though we would take our meals outside. 
It must be within commuting distance. When I 
must go back to the office I could still come out 
every night and so spare the children, who have 
grown used to having me all the time, the sharp 
pang of separation which they always experience 
on such occasions until I turn the corner. A 
place of our own at the shore, with trees and grass, 
with a porch, with first-class train service, and 
costing much less than a hotel would — that is all 
we asked. 

At Laurelmere-by-the-Sea we found everything 
we wanted — except the scale of expenditure, 
which naturally cannot be ascertained until ac- 
counts are checked up at the end of the summer. 



120 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

And we found it almost at the first venture. From 
the street the house looked but so-so. But at the 
back of the house, one flight up, there was a 
porch as large as our big bedroom in Belshazzar 
Court, screened from all observation by lattice- 
work, by thick matted vines, and a willow-tree, 
which stood sentinel guard right in the middle 
and brushed its lower branches against the porch 
railing. The porch looked down on a garden with 
hedges and over the trees there was a blue line on 
the horizon edged with white lace, which was the 
sea. As we stood there on the porch, and the 
renting agent was presumably wondering how 
much he could ask, there slid over the blue line of 
the sea a boat with white sails, with the rigid, 
swanlike motion of a stage boat propelled by a 
gang of expert scene shifters. I don't know 
whether the renting agent had a signal system by 
which a magic boat with white sails could be made 
to glide by just as a prospective tenant stepped 
out on the back porch. There was nothing more 
to be said. We rented the porch with its acces- 
sory rooms, and two weeks later we were in resi- 
dence at Laurelmere. It remained only to hire 
a bathhouse, a beach chair, and a yellow umbrella. 
Our vacation — and simultaneously my own vaca- 
tion from the office — began with a swing. 



LAURELMERE 121 

It is not my intention to give a formal account 
of our experience by the sea. For that matter 
any academic picture of a summer outing must be 
a failure. Fugitive impressions are best. I set 
down the following disjointed notes just as they 
were put to paper, with no attempt at system and 
elaboration : — 

July H. 

Yesterday I tipped the bathhouse attendant 
and this morning I found a new man on our aisle. 
Last Saturday we tipped the grocer's boy and 
the afternoon of the same day he resigned. Last 
week I gave the waitress at the hotel a handsome 
fee to insure for ourselves the favored-nation 
treatment for an indefinite future, and the very 
next day Harold developed mumps and we have 
been taking our meals at home. On the subject 
of tips Emmeline disagrees with Machiavelli, who 
says that men are actuated by the expectation 
of favors to come rather than by gratitude for 
favors in the past. Emmeline says always tip in 
advance ; but the facts are against her. 

My experience with waiters, janitors, and bath- 
house attendants has always been the same. Why 
do they resign after a generous gratuity? It 
cannot be that they take it as an insult. Some- 



122 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

times I have suspected that they resign in order 
to give someone else a chance at me. Or else my 
tip just rounds out the amount of capital on 
which they can afford to retire or go into busi- 
ness for themselves. Perhaps, again, it is only 
the Wanderlust which is so strong in the servitor 
class. The man at the bathing pavilion is still in 
business three aisles further on, and the grocer's 
boy is working for another grocer half a block 
away. It would be an interesting experiment to 
follow up a grocer's boy or a janitor who resigns 
after being tipped. We could transfer our mar- 
keting or our living-quarters to the place of his 
new employment, and so doggedly pursue him 
with tips until he turned upon us in desperation, 
declaring millions for defense, but not a cent for 
tribute. At any rate, here is a suggestion I throw 
out for the psychologists. Whenever you en- 
counter a problem that is too difficult or of no 
particular importance, throw it out as a sugges- 
tion for someone else to work out. 

Juli/ 16, 
The theatrical season here is in full blast. Our 
taste runs strongly to the educational drama. At 
the Bijou we have Dolly Devereux and her Red- 
head Aeroplane Girls. At the Twentieth Cen- 



LAURELMERE 123 

tury we have a white-slave film in four reels, with 
a condensed version in two reels at the half-price 
afternoon performances for children. Our stock 
company is drawing crowded houses to The Lure^ 
which the dramatic reviewer on the local weekly 
has aptly characterized as the most soul-racking 
drama ever written for the purposes of a refined 
evening's entertainment. There is obviously no 
reason why people spending their holidays on this 
unequaled section of the Atlantic Coast should be 
allowed to forget the grimmer aspects of life. As 
the reviewer for the local paper cleverly remarks, 
the sense of human fellowship is as strong on Long 
Island as in the White Mountains or the Maine 
woods. On this point it is instructive to listen to 
comments from the audience as it leaves the 
theater after a performance of this pioneer edu- 
cational drama of the Underworld: 

" It was chilly, but once you got into the water 
it was awfully warm. The sea, you know, is al- 
ways warmer than the air." 

" Isn't it terrible that such things should be 
allowed.'^ " 

" I prefer a voile ; it doesn't wrinkle." 

The Wednesday matinees are well attended. As 
the dramatic reviewer for our paper observes, 
after a performance of The Lure, the visitor will 



124 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

find a dip in the sea a delightful way of rounding 
out the afternoon and preparing for dinner. 

Jvly 17, 
Now that Huerta is out we are chiefly inter- 
ested in how to pronounce " maxixe." I rep- 
resent the conservative wing which pronounces it 
" macksikes," my attitude on all such questions 
having been determined years ago when I learned 
from Professor Woodberry to speak of the melan- 
choly Jayqueeze and the Seven Ages of Man. 
The moderates of the Center pronounce it 
" macheeche." The adherents of the Extreme 
Left pronounce it anywhere from " machoochee " 
to " maxeexeh," the " eh " in the latter form 
representing the suspended and prolonged catch 
of the breath with which French tragediennes pro- 
nounce all final e's, a method in vogue with grad- 
uates of the Misses Ely's school of Stratford atte 
Bowe. We have several Theatres of Danse, one 
Garden of Danse, and many minor Galeries and 
Trianons of Danse, at all of which there is danc- 
ing afternoons and evenings. 

In the drug stores there are stamp machines 
which sell four penny stamps for a nickel. I 
don't know who makes the profit, the Government, 
the patentee of the machine, or the storekeeper. 



LAURELMERE 125 

But a superprofit of twenty-five per cent, strikes 
me as exorbitant. Doesn't this reveal the secret 
of the high cost of living? Say that the average 
young woman on her vacation sends out fifty pic- 
ture postcards a day; that represents an excess 
charge of twelve and a half cents a day, or one 
dollar and seventy-five cents during the fortnight. 
This considerable saving could be effected by 
buying stamps in large quantities at the post 
office, say in sheets of one hundred. All one has 
to do then, when a postcard is to be mailed, is to 
turn out every drawer in one's room and sundry 
pockets. With some care the stamps can be glued 
apart and they are practically as good as new. 

July 19. 
Harold has not been bathing as yet on account 
of the rain and the mumps. While his face was 
still badly swollen he prayed to be allowed to go 
swimming in the rain, but was persuaded not to. 
He contented himself with describing the prodig- 
ious feats he would accomplish in the surf, 
though I extracted from him the promise that he 
would not venture beyond the lifelines. Since the 
swelling on his cheek has subsided and the warm 
weather has come in Harold has been reticent on 
the subject of the water and prefers to play tennis 



126 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

in the back garden. Once or twice he has asked 
whether it is essential to get one's hair wet when 
bathing. 

Jvly 20, 

The number of young men this summer is be- 
low the ordinary level. A fair estimate of the 
crop would be 2.3 per cent, as against an average 
of 4.5 per cent, for the preceding ten years ; this 
not only in spite of but because of the heavy 
rains. Where the young men appear they are im- 
mediately taken up. Two young men arrived at 
the hotel across the street, one morning about 
ten. At 12.15 they were carrying sand cushions 
and wraps for two extremely attractive school 
teachers from Brooklyn. I don't know whether 
the scarcity of young men is due to the prevailing 
economic depression or whether it is the familiar 
phenomenon bewailed by young women at the 
shore that young men this year go to the moun- 
tains, and by young women in the mountains that 
young men go to the shore. This does not explain 
everything, as it would apparently leave the young 
men in a condition like Mohammed's coffin sus- 
pended between the mountains and the sea. 

One result of the scarcity of young men is a 
corresponding increase in the hauteur of the life- 



LAURELMERE 127 

guards. Whereas in ordinary years one of these 
semi-nude Apollos will pose an average of ten 
minutes with folded arms and corrugated brows 
bent upon the sea, this year by actual timing they 
will pose twenty minutes at a stretch. 

July 23. 
In a reclining arm-chair under a large umbrella 
at the edge of the sea, Berniird Shaw's last volume 
of plays is ideal. When you pick up Misalliance, 
with a preface on " Parents and Children," and 
look across to where the outer bar is just covered 
with a filmy lacework of foam, you realize for the 
first time that summer reading is not a question 
of heavy books or light books, but whether the 
pages are cu^■ o^ ^ot. For a man in the very front 
rank of advanced thought Bernard Shaw reveals 
one striking reactionary trait: his books cannot 
be read without a paper-cutter. Yet even in his 
old-fashioned survivals Shaw is himself. The 
pages of Misalliance are not pasted at the top, 
or at the top and side, as they used to be in Vic- 
torian days, but exclusively at the bottom. To a 
true Shavian there may be an inner meaning in 
this peculiarity of the binder's art. A true 
Shavian will not grudge the extra effort of slicing 
open the pages, even if one has to borrow a child's 



128 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sand spade for the purpose. But one who is not 
completely of the faith sometimes shrinks from 
the task. 

Especially if he looks up and finds the outer 
bar completely submerged and the waves lapping 
nearer on the sands. There is no breeze. There 
is no swell in the channel between the main shore 
and the reef, and diminutive sailing craft with 
lowered canvas glide by under motor power. An 
army under yellow and green umbrellas is en- 
camped on the sands. Regiments of engineers- 
ranging in age from three to seven are throwing 
up elaborate fortifications and planting the na- 
tional banner on the escarpment. Regiments of 
sappers and miners drive tunnels under these for- 
tifications and are frequently buried under the 
ruins. The younger engineers, say from three to 
Rye, have a curious habit of neglecting the mate- 
rial on the spot and fetching their sand from a 
distance of twenty feet between their fingers. I 
don't know why, but they make one think of Shaw. 
You pick up the volume on your knee. 

And then it occurs to you that in order to do 
justice to Misalliance^ is it absolutely necessary 
to cut the pages? For one thing you may hold 
the uncut pages apart at the top with two fingers 
and peer down. It is rather a strain on the eyes, 



LAURELMERE 129 

but it can be done. I have done it several times, 
and it struck me that it may have all been inten- 
tional on Shaw's part. With superb confidence 
he set himself to testing the devotion of his ad- 
mirers, and his own power to interest. In that 
drowsy air, with the warm sun on the sands and 
the orchestral murmur of the incoming waters, 
what other writer of our day would dare impose 
upon his readers the alternative of getting out 
of the chair and borrowing a shovel, or holding 
the pages apart with two fingers and peering 
down? The latter process is difficult. Halfway 
down the page you are buried, eyes, nose, and 
chin, between the pages, and the lines toward the 
bottom of the page necessitate a combined down- 
ward and side thrust of the head which is both un- 
aesthetic and bad for the muscles of the neck. The 
gray-blue of the water, the sunlight shimmering 
through the j^ellow umbrella covering, the great 
peace of the shore, come home to you with pecu- 
liar force after you have extracted your face from 
between the pages of Misalliance^ and let your 
neck sway back to the perpendicular. 

But why peep? Bernard Shaw's supreme quali- 
fication for summer reading lies precisely in the 
fact that it is neither necessary to cut his pages 
nor peer between them. Sometimes I do neither, 



ISO BELSHAZZAR COURT 

and I find that I have grasped Shaw's message as 
clearly in this book as I have done in any of his 
books with a paper-knife at hand. His wit, his 
paradox, his sudden and brilliant generalization, 
carry me over the gulf of a couple of untouched 
pages without the least sense of traveling through 
empty space. There can be no feeling of jar in 
passing from page 29 to page S2 in Shaw's dia- 
logue, because the person who is speaking at the 
bottom of page 29 and the person who is speaking 
at the top of page 32 have no perceptible human 
difference. Actually I can recall that some of 
the most illuminating truths in Bernard Shaw have 
come to me just in this way — ^by turning un- 
knowingly from page 29 to page 32. 

Clouds are masking the sun and turning the 
gray-blue of the water into steel gray and dull 
lead. A breeze has sprung up and it frets the 
surface of the channel. Diminutive catboats 
throw up sail and glide by no longer on an even 
keel. Engineers, sappers, and miners are being 
huddled into baby carts and dragged off protest- 
ing to lunch. The life-guard, gray woolen 
sweater and brown slim legs, looks more than ever 
the Superman. Here's the book again. 

It must be the secret of the entire contem- 
porary school of paradox, of whimsy, of individ- 



LAURELMERE 131 

ualistic standards in literature, that it appeals to 
a time-saving age by creating books that can be 
read without cutting the pages. For instance, 
when the book reviewer says of a book that it con- 
tradicts itself, but so does life contradict itself; 
that the author does not prove his point, but 
Nature never bothers about demonstrating any- 
thing ; that his grammar is a bit rough, but so was 
Shakespeare's — when a reviewer says all this of 
an author it is obvious that this author can afford 
to have his pages pasted in couples or in fours. 
He will be just as consecutive as ever. Such an 
author may be read the way old textbooks were 
intended to be read, with the big type for every- 
one, with footnotes in smaller type for the closer 
student, with appendices for the specialist. For 
the extremely frivolous reader, Bernard Shaw 
might come pasted eight pages together ; for the 
more serious reader like myself, two together, and 
so on. 

The idea fascinates me. I imagine myself be- 
ginning a new play of Shaw's by reading every 
eighth page, and returning for a closer grapple 
with his meaning on every fourth page, and so on 
till all the pages were cut. I imagine myself writ- 
ing a little essay in appreciation of Fanny^s First 
Flay based on this kind of research. I call up a 



132 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

picture of the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, etc., a 
fierce, mocking, biting spirit at war with the world 
as it is to-day, and then I compare it with the 
Shaw of pages 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc., a shrewd, 
practical student of human nature, keenly aware 
of its limitations, and generous to our human 
frailties. The combinations are infinite. One 
can always compare the Shaw of pages 1, 3, 4, 7, 
8, 9, 12, 16, with the Shaw of pages 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 
13, 14, 15. By refusing to make use of a paper- 
cutter I could wring out the very heart of Shaw's 
secret here in this chair by the edge of the sea. 



My vacation from the office was a success. It 
would have been a complete success if Harold had 
not brought the germ of mumps with him from 
the city and passed it on to the baby. After that 
we had peace, such perfect peace that I longed for 
the time when I must get back to the city. It 
seemed unmanly, it seemed abominably anti-social 
to be lounging there, a big man in full possession 
of his strength, between the beach and the porch 
hammock while fifty minutes away, in the city, 
four million men and women were sweating to pile 
up the wealth that kept me in idleness. 



LAURELMERE 133 

I came back to the office the day the Kaiser's 
troops appeared before Liege. I do not imply any 
connection between the two events. I am not 
even trying to point out a coincidence. What I 
mean is that henceforth the morning papers be- 
came magic literature, and the fifty minutes' ride 
from Laurelmere was hardly long enough. Thus 
the war in Europe made easy my initiation as a 
commuter. Coming into town and going out we 
read war on the train or talked war. I began to 
form habits. I made acquaintances. There were 
the men who came in on the 7.57 and those who 
came in on the 8.17. There were the men who 
went out on the 5.02 and those who went out on 
the 5.40. Don't imagine that I am going to 
draw any subtle psychological comparisons be- 
tween the 7.57 type of man and the 8.17 type, or 
between the 5.02 type and the 5.40 type. As a 
matter of fact, the men who came in on the 8.17 
were mostly men who had just missed the 7.57, 
and so in the evening. 

On all trains we talked war, — that is, after we 
had exchanged notes on the temperature of the 
water in the sea the night before. On the trains 
I listen better than I talk, and often I was a poor 
listener; but I would let my eyes rest on the quiet 
bay, a marsh at low tide, a lovely inland sea at 



134, BELSHAZZAR COURT 

high, and my thoughts would wander away from 
my companions, but not away from the war. The 
tread of the Kaiser's battalions was heavy on my 
soul. 

One day it took Williams, who sometimes comes 
out with me on the 5.02, exactly twenty-seven 
minutes by the watch to destroy the German Em- 
pire and reconstruct the map of Europe. We 
were still in Flatbush Avenue when Williams began 
an irresistible advance against the right wing of 
the Kaiser's troops in Belgium. Before we reached 
Nostrand Avenue he was pursuing the demoralized 
German legions right off the top of the afternoon 
newspaper on which he had drawn his field of 
operations with a pencil which he borrowed from 
me and failed to return. After that it was a sim- 
ple matter for Williams to outflank the German 
right wing in Alsace and hurl it back in confusion 
off the right-hand edge of his newspaper in the 
general direction of Berlin. The mortality was 
appalling, but no humane considerations could be 
allowed to stand in the way of Field Marshal Wil- 
liams's resolve to swing a complete circle around 
the German armies of the center and force them 
to lay down their arms. This he accomplished 
while we were held up in the tunnel this side of 
East New York and the lights went out. The 



LAURELMERE 135 

incident did not interfere in the least with his 
conduct of operations. Like a great commander 
he seized upon opportunity and turned it to his 
advantage. When the lights were switched on the 
Allies had drawn an iron ring around the German 
forces and were negotiating the terms of capitu- 
lation. Williams had delivered his master stroke 
under cover of the dark. 

" It couldn't have been done without wireless," 
said Williams, and he passed on to his second 
move. 

But I was not listening. I was thinking of wire- 
less. Not the witches' dance of Marconi, De 
Forest, Telefunken, which broke loose in the 
atmosphere over three oceans and several inland 
seas from the moment that England took her 
stand at Armageddon ; admiralty towers and flag- 
ships snapping out commands ; timorous liners, 
only the other day queens of the seas, now 
whimpering to cruisers for help ; cruisers flashing 
curt reassurance ; code, laden with the destiny of 
nations, sharing the impartial air with obvious 
newspaper lies from a dozen capitals ; wireless 
waves zigzagging from coast to coast, crossing, 
colliding — an electric Walpurgis Night symboliz- 
ing the Triumph of Science and Civilization — I 
meant none of these. 



136 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

I was thinking of a much more rarefied wireless 
than Marconi can contemplate — the clash and 
confusion of the prayers of the nations, winging 
their way through the ether to the Throne of 
Grace, imploring divine assistance in the work of 
murder for which they had girded themselves. 
Prayers in German, prayers in English, prayers in 
French and Latin, prayers in Russian, Old Sla- 
vonian, Magyar, Serb, Flemish, Japanese — and 
who knows at this time of writing? — prayers in 
Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Dutch, Scandi- 
navian — the prayers of all the Great Powers 
and the smaller powers storming up to One whom 
in their sacred books they consent to call the 
greatest power of all; calling for victory, which 
is the code word for enemies slaughtered. 

Only a divine intelligence could conceivably 
keep its bearing in this hurly-burly of the S. 0. S. 
litanies of the peoples. Only a divine fortitude 
could endure it. It is hard enough for the human 
father when a brood of hungry children clamor 
for bread and there is no bread to give. But 
what man was ever called upon to decide among a 
pack of children clamoring for each other's de- 
struction ? 

I have set down what I remember of the main 
outlines of Williams's strategy. I have only the 



LAURELMERE 137 

vaguest recollections. Of the tactical details by 
which he won the greatest victory recorded in the 
history of the Long Island Railroad I do re- 
member this much : whenever the Germans were 
confronted by a river Williams compelled them to 
throw pontoon bridges across it under the wither- 
ing fire of the Allies and they perished by the 
thousands. Whereas all the rivers that the Allies 
were under the necessity of crossing shrank in 
size and depth so as to be easily forded. If it 
was a particularly large stream that stood in the 
way of the advance of the victorious Allies, Wil- 
liams looked thoughtful for a moment and then 
erased it with the rubber on my pencil. The Ger- 
man airships were of no avail. Without the least 
compunction Williams flung a couple of French 
aeroplanes against the Kaiser's Zeppelins and the 
proud battleships of the empyrean blew up. 
Sometimes the French aviator was carried along 
to destruction, but most often he volplaned to the 
ground within his own lines. The German re- 
sistance crumpled up before the Allies because 
the Kaiser's troops were all Socialists and fre- 
quently refused to obey their officers. Neverthe- 
less the great enveloping movement of the Allies 
might have failed after all if the heart had not 
been taken out of the German Army by an attack 



138 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

from the rear executed by a powerful British 
fleet which Admiral Williams sent up the Rhine. 
This last move, I believe, was a sudden inspiration 
which came to Williams as we were crossing the 
trestle over Jamaica Bay and he looked out of 
the window and saw fishermen in flatboats dozing 
over their lines. The same sight flung my 
thoughts far from Williams for the moment. 

It occurred to me that the disadvantages of 
believing in one single ruler of the universe must 
be painfully present to the war lords and the 
cabinet ministers and the bishops, archbishops and 
patriarchs when they prepare to go to war. In 
Parliament and before their congregations they 
maintain, of course, that Providence is on their 
side. But in their heart of hearts they must 
sometimes have their doubts. They must wonder if 
the Power whom they claim as an Ally may not 
turn out to be only a Judge. For the purposes 
of war, paganism has an enormous advantage 
over belief in one God. What a nation needs 
when it is preparing to kill more of its neighbors 
than its neighbors can kill of its own citizens is a 
tribal god upon whom it can count for undivided 
attention and sympathy. Berlin could then ad- 
dress its petitions to Moloch, Paris to Beelzebub, 
London to Dagon or Neptune, Rome to Ashtoreth, 



LAURELMERE 139 

with utter confidence and with no danger of con- 
fusion. 

For obviously there must be confusion when 
many nations, professing the same creed, are com- 
pelled to use very much the same formulas of 
prayer, inserting only the respective name of the 
country and its ruler. A private tribal god upon 
whose exclusive services the war leaders might 
count, a private book of prayer embodying the 
really important facts to be brought to the at- 
tention of the tribal god — that is the ideal to 
which the nations of Europe in arms ought to 
strive. 

Decidedly that is the idea. No general forms 
of prayer, but England, submitting its case to 
Dagon, would use its own litany, the Chief Priest 
of Oxbury intoning: 

" Iron Duke — 25,000 tons — ten 13.5-inch guns 
—22 knots. 

" Warspite — 27,500 tons — eight 15-inch guns 
— 25 knots. 

" Valiant — 27,500 tons — eight 15-inch guns — 
25 knots. 

" Audacious — 23,000 tons — ten 13.5-inch guns 
— 21 knots. 

" Thunderer — 22,500 tons — ten 13.5-inch guns 
—20.8 knots." 



140 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

And the choir might declaim the supplementary 
exhortations — the smaller battleships, the armored 
cruisers, the light cruisers, the torpedo-boats and 
destroyers and submarines ; and the congregation 
could join in the final appeal: 

" Five Hundred and Seventy-nine Warships, 
Two Million One Hundred and Sixty-five Thou- 
sand Six Hundred and Seventy-two Tons ! " 

And so Germany might cast into imposing 
forms of prayer her twenty-six army corps, her 
first reserves, her Landwehr, her Landsturm; 
France her admirable batteries of quick-firing 
guns ; Russia her millions of peasants between 
the ages of twenty and forty-five — all cast in sta- 
tistical, practical shape as befits a nation speaking 
to its tribal god who is also its chief of staff. 

Or shall we say that Christianity is like the neu- 
trality of Belgium, which is guaranteed by all the 
nations and inviolate in times of peace, but which 
must not be allowed to stand in the way of the 
interests of a people on the road to great things? 
Here again I am impelled to point out the ad- 
vantages of paganism and the system of tribal 
gods. Take the most practical people of an- 
tiquity, the Romans, and see how admirably the 
system worked with them. They had a tribal god 
w^hom they called Janus, and whenever the Ro- 



LAURELMERE 141 

mans were at war the doors of the temple of Janus 
stood open. In times of peace the doors were 
closed. A thoroughly unsentimental people the 
Romans ; when they needed the help of their tribal 
god, they opened the doors and addressed their 
invocations to him. When peace came and they 
felt that they could dispense with his protection, 
they closed the doors upon him and went about 
their business. 

I asked Williams why he was so bitter against 
the Germans and he said that he regarded them 
— and especially the Kaiser — as enemies of civil- 
ization. He also mentioned Belgian neutrality 
and the balance of power and pointed out the 
danger of universal militarism if Germany should 
win. But I said it seemed to me that if Germany 
were to lose she would immediately set to work to 
build up a bigger army than ever and wait for 
the day of revenge, just as France had waited 
more than forty years. I said that the real way 
to bring about the end of militarism was for Ger- 
many to beat the world virtually single-handed. 
The other nations would then give up the hopeless 
job of competing with Germany and the Kaiser 
could reduce the size of his own army. 

Whereupon Wilh'ams, putting my pencil into 
his own pocket, declared that the Germans needed 



142 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

a licking badly; that it was long coming to them, 
and that now they were going to get it good and 
plenty. That clarified the situation at once. For 
I could not help feeling that Williams in less than 
a minute had touched the heart of a question which 
thousands of editorials in the course of a month 
had failed to reach. If Williams so ruthlessly 
played havoc with the Kaiser's Zeppelins and pur- 
sued the German battalions to the very gates of 
Berlin, it was not because of militarism, or Slav 
against Teuton, or the control of the seas, but 
because he disliked the Kaiser and his Empire. 

I asked why, and Williams said because in Ger- 
many everything was Verhoten. The German 
Empire was one vast Central Park and the Ger- 
man people spent most of their time trying to 
keep off the grass. You had to walk into a railway 
station by one door plainly marked Entrance and 
you had to go out by another door plainly marked 
Exit and if anyone dared to cross the tracks — 
any foreigner that is ; you couldn't imagine a 
native doing it — they sent a major-general and a 
regiment of infantry and arrested you and fined 
you three marks, which is about seventy-three 
cents in our money. Williams said that in Ger- 
many if you met an army officer you had to get 
off the sidewalk and if you were awkward about it 



LAURELMERE 143 

the officer drew his sword and ran you through. 
He said that all male Prussians waxed their 
mustaches like the Kaiser and walked about with 
a get-ofF-the-earth air that was offensive to any 
true democrat. In Germany if you wrote a letter 
you had to write on the envelope " Mr. Doctor the 
Honorable Member of the Higher Street-Flushing 
Council Schmidt," and if you omitted the period 
after Mr. you were challenged to a duel. Wil- 
liams said that because of all those things he had 
never had the slightest temptation to visit Ger- 
many, though he would very much like to see Eng- 
land and Paris. 

I suggested that possibly if he overcame his 
scruples and visited Berlin he might learn to see 
things differently. The Germans might be a bit 
stiff perhaps. But all the faults he had men- 
tioned had their good side. The Germans were a 
disciplined, orderly, loyal people, and it was be- 
cause they knew how to take orders that they had 
accomplished such great things in science, in 
scholarship, in industry, in commerce. 

Williams said " Rot ! " Perhaps he used an- 
other word — at this moment the train was pulling 
up at Broad Channel and the rasp of the brake 
made it difficult to hear. He said what did it mat- 
ter if the Germans did all I had mentioned if it all 



144 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

had to be done under drill-masters. He believed 
in a man doing things after his own way — indi- 
vidual liberty, you know. He liked the Allies — 
English, French, Russians — because they weren't 
up to the Sunday-school standard. They were 
human. And how about little Belgium. Wasn't 
it a wonderful stand she had made against the 
Kaiser .? 

He pulled my pencil from his pocket and im- 
mediately convened a European Congress and be- 
gan cutting up the map of Europe just above the 
weather forecast. Within five minutes Poland had 
reawakened from her degradation of one hundred 
and fifty years and was ruling over two hundred 
thousand square miles of territory. On Wil- 
liams's map the new^ Poland rather interfered 
with the new Belgium which in turn came danger- 
ously close to running into Spain. The Rhine 
gave him a good deal of trouble, but by rubbing 
assiduously with his eraser he managed to change 
its course so that it harmonized with the various 
new boundaries. Whenever the Rhine came into 
collision with an especially desirable piece of ter- 
ritory for Belgium or France he curled the Rhine 
around it. He then proceeded to dismember Aus- 
tria-Hungary and encountered some difficulty in 
distributing the pieces. At first he gave most 



LAURELMERE 145 

of them to Russia, but that made the latter too 
big on the map, so he rubbed out part of the Czar's 
empire and gave it to Servia and Roumania. 

He was rounding out the new boundaries of 
Germany when we reached my station. My im- 
pression is that Germany lost several thousand 
square miles of territory and five million inhabi- 
tants. I lost my pencil. 



VII 

SCHOOL 

Illness broke in upon the beginning of Harold's 
academic career. He did not get fairly under 
way until he was seven years and over. That was 
not so long ago but that we can easily recall the 
warm flush of pride with which we received formal 
notification that our son Harold had passed his 
Entrance Examinations for the Second Grade and 
was now qualified to take up the reading of ordi- 
nary numerals to 1000 and Roman numerals to 
XX, with addition through 9's, and the multipli- 
cation table to 5x9, not to mention objective 
work in simple fractions and problems. The no- 
tion of Harold's " entrance examinations " amused 
Emmeline intensely. At least she took occasion 
during the next two weeks to read the certificate 
out aloud to visitors, laughing almost spontane- 
ously. But when visitors were not about she 
would sometimes pull out the printed card and 
look at it thoughtfully, still smiling, but with 
no evident signs of hilarity. She said that mom- 

146 



SCHOOL 147 

ings, after nine, it was very quiet in the house 
nowadays. It was dehghtful but strange. 

If school brought any spiritual crisis to Harold 
he gave no sign of it. An extraordinary calm in 
the face of exceptional circumstances is one of 
the traits I envy him. Possibly this may be be- 
cause nobody or nothing that presents itself to 
him from the outside can ever approach in interest 
the things that are going on inside of him. He 
will be shy before strangers, but I am inclined to 
think that the Dalai Lama of Tibet would leave 
him unruffled. Kings and Emperors have a 
logical place in Harold's world of ideas, whereas 
an ordinary visitor in the house needs to have his 
presence explained. 

Harold's self-possession was shown in the man- 
ner he conducted himself during his entrance ex- 
aminations. The questions were oral. He had 
just been asked to name the days of the week 
when he observed that one of his shoe-laces had 
come loose. He stooped, adjusted his shoe-lace, 
and gave the days of the week correctly. The 
operation on his shoe was not completed when he 
was asked how much is three and four. He 
solved the problem while still in a semicircular 
position. When Emmeline heard of his behavior 
during the test she was in despair. She foresaw 



148 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the blasting of Harold's educational career at the 
very start. She was of a mind to call up the 
school authorities and let them know that the boy 
did not usually answer questions from the vicinity 
of his shoe tops, and that probably it was nervous- 
ness. But the school authorities evidently knew 
better. They must have discerned in Harold an 
equanimity of the soul, a Spartan calm, which it 
is one of the main purposes of pedagogy to de- 
velop. 

Harold's self-possession is never more conspicu- 
ous than during the two hours that intervene be- 
tween his getting out of bed and his departure 
for school. The flight of time does not exist for 
him. He goes about his toilet with exquisite de- 
liberation. If anything, he dresses and washes 
with greater leisureliness from Monday to Friday 
than he does the other two days of the week. It 
is not an aversion for learning. It is not even 
indifference. Harold does not creep to school. 
He goes cheerfully when we tell him that he is 
ready to go. But while the business of getting 
him ready is under way he views the process ob- 
jectively. It is as if some strange little boy were 
being washed and combed and urged through his 
breakfast until the moment when everything be- 
ing done, the spirit of himself, Harold, enters 



SCHOOL 149 

that alien body and propels it to school. As sail- 
ing-master of his soul it is not for him to bother 
with loading the cargo and battening down the 
hatches. Only when the hawsers are ready to be 
cast off — it is ten minutes of nine and Emmeline's 
nerves are on edge — does the master ascend the 
bridge. Once outside the door he makes excellent 
speed. I have warned Harold repeatedly, but he 
always trots instead of walking, and his manner 
of crossing the avenue gives us some anxiety on 
account of the cars and automobiles. 

Sometimes I think that Emmeline and I assume 
the wrong attitude toward Harold's deliberate 
ways between seven and nine in the morning. In 
our behalf it must be said, of course, that getting 
a boy washed and dressed and fed with only two 
hours to do it in is a task that calls for expedi- 
tion. But in our anxiety to get Harold off to 
school in time we are sometimes tempted to over- 
look the boy's extraordinary spiritual activity 
during these two hours. It is then that the events 
of the preceding day pass in swift procession 
through his mind. At table the night before 
Harold has been silent as usual and apparently 
indifferent to the conversation. As it turns out, 
my remarks on the European situation have been 
caught and registered for fuller investigation. At 



150 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the dinner-table he is too busy balancing the books 
of his own daily concerns. In the morning he is a 
bottomless vessel of curiosity. In the morning, 
while brushing his teeth or over his egg cup, he 
will demand a detailed statement of the causes be- 
hind the great upheaval on the Continent. A 
stranger watching Harold in the act of pulling on 
his stockings might suppose that the boy is im- 
perfectly awake. But I know that his stockings 
get tangled up because he is pondering on the 
character and motives of William II and other 
problems which must be immediately referred to 
me who am busy before the shaving mirror. 

On such occasions I confess that I frequently 
dispose of the European situation with a display 
of summary authority which President Wilson 
would never tolerate in a Mexican dictator. Or 
else I describe the Kaiser in a few ill-chosen and 
inadequate phrases such as naturally suggest 
themselves to one in a hurry before the shaving 
mirror. Later I feel that we are unjust to the 
boy and neglectful of the educational opportuni- 
ties he affords us. If the secret of pedagogy is 
to find the moment when the child's mind is in its 
most receptive state, and feed it with the infor- 
mation which, at other times, involves effort to 
absorb, it seems a pity that at 7.30 in the morn- 



SCHOOL 151 

ing I should be busy with my razor. I have seldom 
encountered a human being so eager to be in- 
structed as Harold is at twenty minutes of nine 
with his glass of milk still before him. Some day 
an educational reformer will cut the ground from 
under the Froebelians and Tolstoyans and Mon- 
tcssorians by devising a system of bedroom and 
bathroom and breakfast-table education. Under 
such a system all the instructor would have to do 
would be to follow the child about while he is get- 
ting ready for school and answer questions. Fif- 
teen minutes with Harold while he is lacing his 
shoes would give his instructor enough mental 
spontaneity and spiritual thirst to equip an entire 
classroom. 

Our knowledge of what happens to Harold at 
school between the hours of nine and one is frag- 
mentary. From the school sj^llabus we learn, of 
course, that besides being engaged upon the art 
of reading numbers up to 1000 and Roman num- 
erals to XX supplemented by the multiplication 
table as far as 5x9, Harold is being instructed 
in English Literature, in Language, in History 
beginning with Early Life on Manhattan, in Na- 
ture Study, in the Industrial and the Fine Arts, in 
Music and Phj^sical Training. We have, too, oc- 
casional reports from the schoolroom regarding 



152 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Harold's backwardness in concentration and pen- 
manship, as opposed to his proficiency in Lan- 
guage and History. Then there are the mothers' 
meetings. But such information is either too 
theoretical or too specific. Of the boy's mental 
growth in the round we have no way of judging 
except as he reveals himself spontaneously. 

And Harold reveals very little indeed. His 
school life falls from his shoulders the moment he 
steps out into the street. If there were no 
syllabuses, mothers' meetings, and occasional re- 
ports, and we were left to find out the nature of 
Harold's curriculum from what he offers to tell, 
our ideas would be even more fragmentary than 
they are. What we are compelled to do is to 
piece together stray remarks at table or while the 
boy is dressing or undressing, laconic bulletins 
delivered with no particular relevance, or else if 
relevant, uttered in a matter-of-fact tone, as hav- 
ing no very intimate relation to himself, much as 
I should throw out an item from the evening paper 
to fill out a blank in conversation. Only thus did 
I find out that Harold models in clay, that he sews 
his own Indian suit for the Commencement 
pageant, that he does practical gardening and 
folk dancing. I am not sure about basket-work 
and elementary wood-carving. We know that he 



SCHOOL 153 

writes because there has been some complaint about 
his lack of neatness, which his teacher is inclined to 
explain as arising from the broader defect of in- 
adequate attention. 

You must not suppose that Harold is an indif- 
ferent scholar in the sense of being a poor student 
or devoid of the sense of duty. Of his ambition I 
am not so sure. The fact remains that he passed 
his entrance examinations easily and that at the 
end of the year, in spite of a month's absence on 
account of measles, he was promoted into Grade 3. 
Harold is indifferent to the extent that he does 
not bring his school away with him as I bring my 
own work home with me, to worry over. Harold's 
reticence is partly due to his highly developed 
sense of the sanctity and sufficiency of his private 
thoughts. Partly it is due to the capacity of every 
child to live in the moment and let it drop from 
him when he passes on to the next interest, whether 
it be from school to lunch, or from lunch to play, 
or from play to supper. But on the whole I con- 
sider Harold's lack of conversation about school as 
in the highest sense a tribute to the efficiency of his 
teachers and as evidence that he is happy with 
them. School has fitted so well into his scheme 
of life, has been accepted by him as so much a 
matter of course, that he no more thinks it neces- 



154 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sary to refer to school than he would to the fact 
that he has enjoyed his supper. 

In conversation at table Harold's teacher will 
come up quite frequentl3\ This shows that she 
is a factor in his life. The mention of Harold's 
teacher will sometimes irritate Emmeline because 
the boy is in the habit of citing teacher as an 
authority on elementary truths that Emmeline has 
been at much pains to inculcate. By way of noth- 
ing in particular — Harold's disclosures of his 
school life are nearly always by way of nothing in 
particular — he will declare that his teacher said 
that to bolt food without chewing is bad for the 
digestion. Inasmuch as Emmeline has devoted 
several years to training Harold in that important 
physiological principle, she is rather vexed that a 
single statement by teacher should have assumed 
an authority which prolonged instruction on her 
own part has failed to attain. Or there will be a 
somewhat harassing dispute as to whether it is 
time for Harold to go to bed. The next morning 
while pulling on his stockings Harold will declare 
— incidentally Harold is always in a mood, the 
morning after, to confess that he was in the wrong 
the night before — that his teacher said that 
boys who did not sleep enough had something 
happen to their chests and shoulders which pre- 



SCHOOL 155 

vented them from playing football when they grew 
up. I do not mean to say that teacher's word will 
count as against Emmeline's. But it hurts to have 
the boy look outside for sanctions to a code of be- 
havior in which he has been drilled at home. I 
imagine it is in such moments Emmeline feels the 
first pangs of a child's ingratitude. But it is a 
trait that has value and significance. When 
Harold, who has been drinking milk with his meals 
since infancy, observes that his teacher said that 
milk is good for children, it occurs to me that he 
is only experiencing that need of an external prop 
for useful habits which is at the basis of religion. 
Not that there is in Harold's attitude to his 
teacher anything of religious awe. She is simply 
the exponent of the laws of his environment, laws 
which the boy knows cannot be violated as so many 
of the laws enunciated at home, which are subject 
to suspension and modification. To every child, I 
imagine, school is the place where the rule prevails 
and home is the place where exceptions to the rule 
may be safely invoked. Here is the fallacy in so 
much modern speculation on parents and teachers 
which would confound the functions of the home 
and the school by injecting the rule of affection 
into the school and the rule of discipline into the 
home. If the home is to remain a little isle of 



156 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

peace for its members I fail to see why Harold 
should be less entitled than myself to invoke its 
asylum. If I find in the home a refuge against 
the hard competitive conditions of my business 
life, Harold should rightly find in the home a 
refuge against the fairly rigid rules without which 
school is inconceivable. I disagree with the prev- 
alent theory in not at all being sure that women 
who are mothers make the best teachers. And I 
am not sure that women who have taught children 
in class make the best mothers. In the externals 
of method and discipline they may have the ad- 
vantage. But it is absurd to suppose that the 
principles which guide a woman in charge of the 
little community of the classroom are the rela- 
tions which should subsist between the mother and 
the handful of children of her own body. 

An exceedingly complex subject this question of 
the freedom of the child. I am not sure that I 
understand it. Neither am I sure that the militant 
advocates of the freedom of the child understand 
it. At any rate, in so many arguments on the 
rights of the child, I find a lurking argument for 
the rights of parents as against the child. The 
great implication seems to be that the modern way 
for a mother to love her children is to have the 
teacher love them for her. The modern way to 



SCHOOL 157 

train the child is to deny him the indulgences 
which the child, as the victim of several tens of 
thousands of years of foolish practice, has learned 
to expect from his parents. The freedom of the 
child seems to demand that he shall not bother his 
parents. There must be discipline in the matter 
of a child's sitting up after supper to wait 
for father from the office. But he must be al- 
lowed the utmost freedom in learning to read num- 
bers up to 1000 and Roman numerals to XX. No 
fetters must be imposed upon Harold's personality 
when he is studying the date of the discovery of 
America, but there are rigorous limitations on the 
number of minutes he is to frolic with me in bed 
or to interrupt me at the typewriter when I am 
engaged in rapping out copy that the world could 
spare much more easily than Harold's soul can 
spare a half hour of communion with me. 

Am I wrong in thinking of the reorganized child 
life a la Bernard Shaw as a scheme under which 
the schoolboy with shining face creeps unwillingly 
home and little girls do samplers saying " God 
bless our School"? Home — a phalanstery of in- 
dividuals, mature and immature, with sharply de- 
fined rules against mutual intrusion. School — a 
place with no rules of conduct save those working 
secretly, an anarchy saved from chaos by a con- 



158 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

cealed benevolent despotism a la Montessori. The 
advanced child culturists 'puzzle me. In life they 
simply adore self-assertion in the face of adverse 
circumstances. In life they believe that character- 
building is attained by knocking one's head against 
environment, and love for liberty is nourished only 
under despotism. Why not apply the same logic 
to the child in school? What sort of mental and 
moral fiber is developed by having the child in 
conflict with nothing in particular? How can 
anyone, child or adult, revolt against the mush 
of the super-Froebelian, super-Montessorian meth- 
ods of pedagogical non-resistance? 

I should be more vehement against the compli- 
cated and expensive machinery of Montessorians 
and other superpedagogues if I thought their 
methods really as efficacious as people would have 
me believe. I should then protest against the re- 
finements of an educational system which is within 
the reach only of the privileged few. I am enough 
of a demagogue to grow angry at the thought of 
all those beautifully balanced systems of peda- 
gogy, of education by music and the dance and 
rhythmic physical development which demand elab- 
orate plants, expensive teachers, and a leisureli- 
ness which the State and the city can never supply 
to the children of the masses. If I were a revolu- 



SCHOOL 159 

tionist of the sanguine type I should be content to 
make education difficult and expensive and then 
insist that all children have it. But I am not a 
revolutionary optimist, and until the modern State 
is prepared to spend on its schools fifty times as 
much as it does to-day, I resent the tendency 
toward a double system of education, one of joy- 
ous and harmonic development for the children of 
the rich and one of mechanical routine and hard 
practicality for the other nine children out of ten. 
That is, I don't resent it. What I mean is that 
I should resent it if the efficacy of the costly mod- 
em systems were really superior to the ready- 
m.ade store-clothes education offered to the chil- 
dren of the democracy. The expensive educa- 
tional systems are not a cause but an effect. Any 
system adopted by the rich for the education of 
their children will result in the bringing up of 
sanguine, self-assertive, harmoniously developed 
thoroughbreds. As between the graduate of the 
Eurythmic schools of Jacques Dalcroze and the 
graduate of Public School number 55, Manhattan, 
I admit that the Eurythmic child will come much 
nearer to the Hellenic ideal of free-stepping, 
graceful, masterful individuality. But it is not 
Montessori and Dalcroze that make the child of 
the income-tax-paying classes a Superchild. It 



160 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

is the habit of paying income tax that produces 
Superchildren. The mediaeval methods of Eton 
and Harrow have been turning out precisely the 
ideal product in the shape of the English gentle- 
man if poise, a rich appetite, and the assumption 
of one's own supreme worth are what you are 
striving for. 

I am enough of a demagogue to have been 
rather cast down when it was decided to send 
Harold to a private school. There were reasons 
enough. The boy's health, upon experiment, was 
not equal to the strain of a school day from nine 
till three in the afternoon (actually Harold's 
school day began at eight in the morning because 
of the part-time system enforced by the over- 
crowding of the classes, which Montessori will 
have to take into consideration). Harold's day 
now is from nine o'clock till one, with a brief re- 
cess for play and an intermission for lunch if 
desired. And a schedule which includes physical 
training, nature study, clay modeling, basket 
weaving, and pageant rehearsals seems in no 
danger of overtaxing the child's mind. (Once 
more I fall victim to my antiquated prejudices, 
when I imply that modeling in clay and sewing In- 
dian costumes do not involve a strain on the 
mind. I know that the newer psychology and the 



SCHOOL 161 

newer pedagogy have shown that there is more 
cerebration involved in cutting out paper pat- 
terns than in memorizing the multiplication table. 
But I am a slave to the old vocabulary. The 
reader forewarned will make the proper deduc- 
tions.) 

Nevertheless I did feel a pang at separating 
Harold from the public school. Emmeline laughed 
and asked whether I was afraid that Harold would 
turn out a snob. Perhaps I was a bit afraid of 
that, but at bottom it was not fear that Harold 
would go to the bad in his private school, but that 
he would do very well there. In other words, it 
was the feeling I have just expressed, whether it 
was fair that Harold should be put into the way 
of having a very delightful time at school, with 
easy hours under splendid hygienic conditions and 
work reduced largely to play, while so many of 
the boys he plays with cannot afford these advan- 
tages. That is, not advantages. As I have said, 
Harold will probably get no more out of his small 
carefully-guarded classes than the other children 
will get out of the overcrowded classes in the pub- 
lic school. But as a sign of social inequality the 
thing offended me. If you will, you may call this 
a gospel of envy. But in my heart I could not 
help taking sides with the children of the disin- 



162 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

herlted against Harold as a representative of the 
exploiting classes. 

As to the fear of Harold's turning into a snob, 
that has long been shown to be completely un- 
founded. On this subject Harold's itinerary from 
his school to his home is illuminating evidence. I 
have said that in the morning Harold trots to 
school. In the morning Harold probably gets to 
school in five minutes. Returning it takes him 
half an hour. Emmeline has questioned him on 
the subject. It appears that in returning from 
school Harold maps a course due north by west 
by east by south so as to cover every local bit of 
topography that comes within his knowledge dur- 
ing the play hours of the afternoon. He tacks 
around unnecessary corners. He beats his way up 
a hill in the park which is a favorite tourney-place 
for the marble players of the vicinity. He skirts 
the shore of several window displays to the con- 
tents of which he has turned the conversation at 
home on several occasions. For five minutes at a 
time he is totally becalmed against some smooth 
expanse of brick wall excellent for handball prac- 
tice or on a sheltered corner for a bit of prelimi- 
nary knuckle exercise with his agates and his 
" immies." The White Wing flushing the pave- 
ment engages Harold's attention for as long as 



SCHOOL 163 

the work may seem to demand. Then, having as- 
sured himself that the world at 1.30 in the after- 
noon is very much as he left it at six o'clock the 
night before, he hastens to his lunch. 

No, there is little danger of the boy's growing 
up an aristocrat. The fierce democracy of the 
Street has him in its grasp. He chooses his play- 
mates by preference from the lower classes. He 
is like Walt Whitman in the way he singles out 
the dirtiest little boy in the block and says to him, 
" Camerado." He takes his fellow men as he finds 
them. When Harold was first sent off to school 
Emmeline was concerned to find a nice little boy 
for him to play with. She discovered one in a 
classmate of Harold's. We invited him to the 
house, and in half an hour a considerable portion 
of the wall paper in Harold's room was hanging in 
fringes. But in spite of a common basis of taste 
and temperament the two boys are not much to- 
gether, for the very reason, I presume, that their 
friendship has been to some extent imposed on 
them from above. No; Harold's tastes go down 
straight to the foundations of our social structure. 
Without recognizing class-distinctions he w^ould 
rather play marbles with the son of a retail trades- 
man than with the son of a college professor, and 
with the son of a janitor than with the son of a 



164. BELSHAZZAR COURT 

storekeeper. If the janitor is a negro so much 
the better. The negro boys have the advantage 
over Harold in the matter of tint at the beginning 
of a game of marbles. But within half an hour 
Harold has overcome the handicap. If anything, 
his is the deeper shade of brown, though his color 
is not so evenly distributed. In such guise I can 
recognize Harold by a sort of instinct. But the 
only way a stranger could tell the child of Cauca- 
sian descent from the child of the Hamite would 
be by measuring Harold's cephalic index. 

It is a serious problem — the gains of democracy 
and the price we must pay. There are obvious 
advantages: the boy's education in the sense of 
human fellowship without regard to caste and 
color; his education in the rough and ready but 
fairly equitable laws of the Street; his gain in 
self-confidence and self-restraint in play; not to 
mention the extremely beneficent effect on his ap- 
petite and his digestion. I have watched the boy 
at his marbles in the park, more eager, more 
drunken with the joy of existence than he is at 
school or in the house. I have seen him sprawl 
down on his knees and with the pad of his palm 
and four outstretched fingers measure off eight or 
ten horrible hand spaces in the dust from the hole 
to his opponent's marble. I have seen him rise 



SCHOOL 165 

from the earth like Antaeus, triumphant but hor- 
ribly besmirched, with the blue of his eyes gleam- 
ing piratically through the circumjacent soil; I 
have watched him and rejoiced and had my qualms. 
The price that Harold pays for democracy is in 
a slovenliness of speech which I find merely of- 
fensive but Emmeline finds utterly distracting. 
It seems a pity to have his school drill in phonetics 
and the memorizing of good literature vitiated by 
the slurred and clipped syllables of the streets. 
Harold says, " It is me," and frequently he says, 
" It is nuttin'." The final g of the participle has 
virtually disappeared from his vocabulary. He 
sometimes says, " I ain't got nuttin'." While Em- 
meline is distracted I am merely offended, because 
I recall that there is a great body of linguistic 
authority growing up in favor of Harold's demo- 
cratic practices in phonetics and grammar. When 
Harold says, "It is me," Professor Lounsbury 
should worry. By the time Harold grows up it 
will probably be good grammar to say, " I ain't 
got nothing." By the time Harold grows up the 
Decalogue, in its latent recension, will read, " Thou 
shalt not have none other gods before I," and 
" Thou shalt not bear no false witness against 
none of thy neighbors." I must not forget that 
whereas I have been brought up on Matthew 



166 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

Arnold, De Quincej, and Stevenson, Harold is 
growing up in the age of John Masefield. If the 
greatest literature and the foremost language is 
to be racy of the soil — and for that matter not 
only our speech and our literature, but if our 
morals and our social outlook are to be racy of 
the soil — if in every section of life the cry is back 
to the land, to the primitive, to the unashamed, 
sex-education, untrammeled art, democracy at its 
broadest, if — well, what I mean is that in any 
civilization based upon close contact with the soil, 
Harold will not be lost. Soil is right in his line. 
I am less concerned with the effect of the street 
upon Harold's vernacular because the boy seems 
gratefully immune against the more sordid aspects 
of the open-air life. His phonetics and his gram- 
mar are deteriorating, but there is no trace of foul- 
ness in his speech and in his thoughts. The rea- 
son is that Harold's open-air activities are con- 
fined entirely to play. His democracy centers 
about the ball ground and the marble pit. His 
absorption in games is so complete — too complete, 
to judge by the nervous exhaustion it sometimes 
brings — that it leaves no leisure or inclination for 
idle speech. His technical vocabulary of games 
is comprehensive. I sometimes marvel at the ease 
with which he has mastered the patois of sport — 



SCHOOL 167 

those cabalistic words which, shouted at the proper 
moment, signify that Harold prefers to let his 
marble rest and have his opponent shoot at him 
or that he has chosen to mark off so many hand 
spaces in the dirt and shoot at his opponent. But 
once the game is done he comes upstairs. He does 
not share in the spiritual life of the gang and 
he knows absolutely nothing of the premature 
intimacies of street childhood with the bitterness 
of life. On the whole I find the balance is in favor 
of marbles and democracy. 

Harold in the open air is an exceedingly impor- 
tant factor and a badly neglected one in present- 
day discussion of the child. The talk is either of 
the school or the home. If play is taken into 
account it is the regulated play of the school 
ground. Yet the Street is the citadel of the lib- 
erties of the child. Take the actual question of 
hours in Harold's day. He spends nearly twelve 
hours in bed, from seven to seven. He spends two 
hours, almost, at his meals. He spends four hours 
at school. He spends five hours at least in play. 
Under such an arrangement all talk about the 
despotism of school and the despotism of parents 
loses meaning to me. I have shown that the boy's 
school life is happy. But even if it were not, even 
if his body and soul were subjected to the tyran- 



168 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

nies the sentimental revolutionist is so fond of call- 
ing up, those twelve hours of sleep and five hours 
of play are a reservoir of physical and spiritual 
recuperation which would make life more than tol- 
erable to Harold. On the whole I think I am not 
less sensitive than Harold to pain and oppression. 
But if my employer were to let me sleep twelve 
hours in the twenty-four and play five hours and 
spend two hours at table, I should consider myself 
a very happy man. 

I have reserved my confession for the very last. 
I find it difficult to take school at Harold's age — 
or for that matter at any age — ^seriously enough 
to grow extremely agitated over its problems. 
Montessori or Dr. Birch — the diff*erence is not 
vast. Naturally I do not go as far as Mr. 
Squeers. School is just a ripple on the surface of 
the ocean of young life and feeling, and whether 
the ripple shapes after the Froebel pattern or the 
Montessori wrinkle makes little diff*erence to the 
depths below. I can make the assertion with con- 
fidence about Harold without any very precise 
knowledge of what are the depths in him. 



VIII 

HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 

There are anxious days in Belshazzar Court 
when the spirit of meekness and self-sacrifice de- 
scends upon Harold. The change usually comes 
on without warning, though by watching very 
closely we can detect the insidious approach of 
Harold's goodness. He will come up from his 
marbles or ball game a bit earlier than usual and 
put away his tools with a gentle air of disen- 
chantment. Like Ecclesiastes, Byron, and Ga- 
briele D'Annunzio, he has found the emptiness 
of pleasure and he makes a voluntary offer of his 
entire stock of agates to the baby, which reminds 
me of King Lear. At table he will emerge com- 
pletely out of the world of private concerns in 
which he customarily dwells and ask how cannon 
are made and what is the immediate outlook for 
Home Rule. But more frequently his days of 
calm will follow upon a night of wrack and storm, 
which leaves every member of the family ex- 
hausted. The exact course of Harold's moods is 
still to be put on the map. 

169 



170 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

At any rate, soon after six in the morning, 
when the orchestral chorus of Belshazzar Court 
is tuning up with a click of water-pipes, the whir 
of coffee-grinders, and muffled explosions from the 
gas-range turned on in full force by sleepy-eyed 
maids, we grow aware of a saintly presence in 
Harold's room. Someone is moving about gently 
with evident concern for those of us still in bed. 
Doors open with the same discreet caution. Soft- 
ened footsteps pad along the hallway, and there is 
a gentlemanly splashing in the bathroom. Inves- 
tigation discloses that it is a quarter of seven and 
Harold in an arm-chair before the window reading 
his Arabian Nights. He is washed, dressed, 
combed, and brushed. The problems of the toilet, 
the choice of a suit for the day, the discovery of 
the one unlucky shoe which always gets lost — 
all these customary intricacies have been solved, 
swiftly, surely, and with an economy of motion 
and noise that would delight the hearts of a con- 
gressful of scientific engineers. 

Naturally we ask Harold whether he is not feel- 
ing well. He says that he is very well. But he 
says it in a tone of seraphic patience that leaves 
us unconvinced, and when Harold announces that 
it is his intention always to get up at this hour 
in the future and to dress without bothering his 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 171 

mother, Emmeline calls him to her and feels his 
head. His forehead is cool. His tongue is red 
and moist. His eyes are clear. But just when 
Emmeline is ready to be reassured Harold asks 
whether the baby had been restless and hopes that 
she did not disturb our sleep in any way. There- 
upon Emmeline feels his forehead once more and 
recalls that whenever he has been seriously ill the 
evil came on slowly. 

Harold is thoughtful over his breakfast, but 
eats neither too fast nor too slowly, and with none 
of the minor accidents that sometimes mark his 
self-absorbed demeanor at table. Emmeline 
watches him, and Harold, knowing that he is 
watched, pretends not to notice. Emmeline recalls 
that this is the way people behave who are gravely 
afflicted. They pretend not only that they are not 
ill and are not anxious about themselves, but that 
they do not notice other people's anxiety about 
themselves. About half-past seven Harold gets 
up from the table and asks which coat is he to 
wear to school. Inasmuch as this is one hour and 
twenty minutes earlier than his usual time for de- 
parture, Emmeline shakes her head. She even 
makes a motion to feel Harold's brow again, but I 
protest that the constant friction is enough in It- 
self to give the boy a temperature. So we tell the 



172 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

boy that it is too early to go to school and he may 
play in his room. He says he is tired of play and 
he would prefer to practice his penmanship because 
he had been told that if his writing improved he 
would be moved up to the upper half of the class. 
" I like to write my words in the morning," he says. 
" I am going to do it every day." He works at 
his model sentences until Emmeline tells him that 
he has done enough and must now play awhile. 

"Have I time? " he asks, and his voice is like 
St. Cecilia. It is heartrending, this fear of dread- 
ful evil impending over Harold which one discerns 
but cannot localize. He insists on leaving for 
school twenty minutes too early. Before going he 
declares that he likes to go to school with his shoes 
nicely polished. He had polished them himself. 

At night I find the atmosphere sultry with ap- 
prehension. The suspense begins to tell. Harold 
came home directly from school instead of follow- 
ing his usual roundabout course by which he cov- 
ers three blocks in thirty-five minutes. At lunch 
he asked for stewed carrots. Harold detests 
stewed carrots, and there were none for lunch nor 
had there been any for several days in deference to 
his prejudices. He was disappointed to hear that 
there were no carrots, and he asked that he might 
have some to-morrow and every day thereafter. 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 173 

Determined to break up this mood of painful beati- 
tude, Emmeline asks whether he would like some 
ice cream for dessert. " Is ice cream good for 
me? " he asks, and nearly brings his mother to 
tears. 

If only he would break something! But no. 
Harold, whose course about the house is so fre- 
quently strewn with chairs shoved out of place 
and things dropping from tables and book-shelves, 
moves about like Isadora Duncan, a graceful 
wraith among inviting corners and edges. After 
lunch, I am told, he pulled the heaviest accessible 
volume from the book-shelves, a book which he 
knew had no pictures in it, and he read several 
pages of Clayhanger with extraordinary concen- 
tration. He did not refuse to go out to play, and 
his apparent indifference was belied by the fact 
that he did not reappear until late in the after- 
noon. There was a gleam of hope in that, and 
Emmeline was further encouraged when he came 
upstairs in about his customary condition of be- 
smirchment ; we seemed to be seeing light. 

Harold was in his room making ready for bed 
while we at table wondered what it all meant. 
Suddenly there was the sound of a crash followed 
by a yell. Emmeline raised her head and a look 
of ineffable relief came into her face. The yell 



174 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

emanated from the baby. She yelled again and 
then Harold shouted. They alternated for some 
time and then fell into a duet of indignant clamor. 
I went to study the situation on the spot. I found 
that just as he had taken off one shoe and was 
busy with the other something had happened to 
Harold's soul which impelled him to get out of bed 
and run out into the hall and overturn the baby's 
doll carriage with its precious burden. He had 
then taken the doll and thrown it under the bed and 
was making a pretense of climbing into the doll 
carriage. It took some time to disentangle the 
two, but we did it with glad hearts. Harold was 
himself again. 

I am convinced that he has a sense of humor. 
It does not consist in saying the bright things 
which are funny to us but quite serious to the 
child who utters them. To the extent that children 
are consciously humorous they are so in action 
rather than in speech. And even in action it is 
hard to tell how much is humor and how much is 
mischief which accidentally takes on an amusing 
aspect. An example of this kind would be the 
disposition Harold once made of his garters for 
several nights running. Switching on the light 
in his room one night, when the boy was fast 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 175 

asleep, I discovered his garters neatly strung over 
the chandelier. Even by standing on his bed 
Harold could not reach the chandelier. The feat 
therefore must have required some very deft 
angling and a degree of patience that I never 
thought was in the boy. I suppose Harold's gar- 
ters on the gas bracket would be humor to Pro- 
fessor Bergson, since the incongruity of the result 
must have been present to the boy's mind. Yet 
the impelling motive was mischief. 

But Harold was without question a self-con- 
scious humorist when I found him one night in 
bed supposedly trying to go to sleep. He had 
taken a piece of wrapping cord and tied one end 
to his left thumb and the other end to the bed- 
stead. When I asked what it all meant he said it 
was to keep himself from falling out of bed. Is it 
paternal pride in me which makes me discern a 
master's touch in that episode? At any rate, there 
was here a calculated effect upon a possible audi- 
ence. He had been lying there in the dark and 
chuckled and waited for someone to come in. 

It is no argument against Harold as a humorist 
that he is also a good deal of a baby. Whatever 
may be the case with your epigrammatic wits and 
their penny stock of worldly disenchnntment, true 
humor comes out of an inextinguishable innocence 



176 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

of the heart. Mark Twain had it and Mr. Dooley 
has it and Swift had it, and I believe that Harold 
has it. Only the innocent heart can pass quickly 
from laughter to tears ; laughter which means a 
child-like contentment with the goodness of the 
world, and tears which mean profound discourage- 
ment with the badness of the world, instead of the 
thin-lipped wit which is based on the conviction 
that there is no good and no bad — unless the good 
is bad and the bad good — and that it doesn't mat- 
ter anyway. But though I have my theory pat 
on the subject, I find it always a shock to think 
that a humorist capable of a masterpiece like tying 
himself into bed with a wrapping string should oc- 
casionally be discovered at play in a corner with 
furnishings from the wardrobe of his sister's doll. 
Not frequently, in justice to Harold, but it 
happens. 

Nor is it against Harold's sense of humor that 
he will often laugh without occasion but because 
of his mere capacity for laughter. Harold's ex- 
perience with the Home Page in the afternoon 
newspaper is illuminating on this point. The Home 
Page, as is well known, is equally divided between 
comic pictures and text and serious aids to house- 
keeping, a division at that time unknown to Harold, 
who was interested only in the comics. These pic- 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 177 

tures he had got me into the habit of expounding 
to him, and since the artist knew his audience, 
Harold laughed in the proper places. However, it 
happened one day that Harold, not having had 
enough of the comic pictures, insisted that I read 
to him the printed text in small type distributed 
between the pictures. I read all the jokes, and he 
was not yet satisfied. So I went on and read the 
Household Hints to him — how young potatoes 
should be kept in a small flat, and how linen hand- 
kerchiefs should be ironed, and what will relieve 
rheumatism of the arm-joints; and when I men- 
tioned new potatoes or linen or rheumatism of 
the arm- joints Harold held his sides and shrieked. 
Evidently this could have happened only to the 
innocent soul laden to the bursting point with 
laughter and waiting for the prick of the magic 
word like potatoes or linen handkerchief or rheu- 
matism to release the flood. 

He has his dark moods. They come on as sud- 
denly as his attacks of goodness. There is the 
mood of destruction. Not that Harold is con- 
tinent at best. He consumes clothes, books, to3^s 
with a swiftness which may be the sign of an 
enviable capacity for living in the moment only. 
Who knows.'* As modern parents it would be pre- 



178 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

sumptuous in us to attempt to impose our own 
standards of orderliness and routine upon the boy. 
But the moods of destruction to which I refer are 
Harold's ordinary state raised to the nth power. 
On such a day his path is through wreckage. 
Things break, tear, rip, slice, and crumble to 
pieces under his fingers. His own body does not 
escape. It is a day of falls, cuts, bruises, a gen- 
eral malaise, which expresses itself in frequent 
tears ; and when he is not crying he is on the edge 
of whimpering. The moral law and the law of 
gravitation seem to be simultaneously repealed for 
him. Objects that ought to remain suspended on 
the wall precipitate themselves to the floor. Ob- 
jects like chairs and footstools which properly be- 
long on the floor turn somersaults, mount upon the 
beds, clamber over each other. Harold is by turns 
spiteful, sullen, boisterous, unhappy, and as a 
rule, bandaged. These are days when all the woe 
of the world seems to have descended upon 
his shoulders. 

I have often wondered why educators and re- 
formers who are so concerned for the freedom of 
the child will deny the child's right to such occa- 
sional moods of sullen rebellion. For ourselves, 
grown-up men and women, we are very ready to 
claim the slightest excuse for anti-social behavior. 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 179 

A touch of indigestion will serve a man as suffi- 
cient reason for coming down to the office with a 
scowl and barking all morning at his subordinates. 
And the victims of his temper also think the rea- 
son sufficient: the poor fellow probably ate un- 
wisely last night after the theater. The dyspeptic 
touch will cause a man to douse himself in oceans 
of self-pity as if any reason on earth existed why 
he should wreak himself on welsh rarebits at 
midnight. 

Whereas the child? With full knowledge of 
the delicate nature of his physiological machinery 
we yet deny that any mechanical dislocation is suf- 
ficient excuse for his making other people uncom- 
fortable. Up to the age of four or five the right 
to be fretful after loss of sleep is probably recog- 
nized by most parents. But between five and 
twelve, say, the presumption is that a boy must 
either be under the doctor's care or else in perfect 
health. The intervening stages of discomfort, 
fatigue, nervous strain, are overlooked. Sullen- 
ness, that most disagreeable of qualities in a child, 
can easily be traced to a physiological basis, and 
one much less reprehensible than the midnight 
rarebit of the adult or the wild debauches of shop- 
ping and dress-fitting that lead to headaches. But 
whereas strong men can go down to the office and 



180 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

growl and women can retire to their rooms with 
a handkerchief around the head, the child is de- 
nied the privilege of seeking the seclusion which 
he needs. If like a young animal he looks for a 
corner in which to suck his wounded paw, we call 
it sullenness and insist that he remain in our so- 
ciety and find it agreeable. The right of the child 
to be out-of-sorts occasionally is one of the 
privileges which must be inscribed in any charter 
of freedom that the Century of the Child is to 
draw up for him. 

But if Harold is destructive he is not blood- 
thirsty. In this respect I believe he is an excep- 
tional child. He is warlike, but a love of gore for 
its own sake does not possess him. He will arm 
himself with a crusader's dirk made of a lead pencil 
and a clothespin and inflict gaping wounds on the 
mattress and the pillow, but I have never heard 
him ask for buckets of blood to drink as other 
children will do. In stories of Christian martyrs 
and the lions I do not recall that he has taken 
sides with the lions. He is happy to shoot down 
countless enemies — represented by ninepins or 
perhaps his sister's dolls — with an improvised rifle, 
but he does not go to the extreme of mutilating 
his enemies and parading their reeking heads upon 
the point of the sword like other boys of his age I 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 181 

know. The sight of his own life's fluid stirs him 
to inexpressible outcries of anguish and imaginary 
pain. I recall one visit to the dentist, a grim and 
prolonged engagement in which Harold lost a 
tooth and the dentist nearly lost his reason. That 
entire afternoon, after he was quite well, the boy 
would apply his handkerchief to his mouth every 
ten minutes and, detecting an imaginary red spot, 
he would howl like someone in Dante. 

Actual pain he bears very well. If he cries when 
he is ill, it is largely out of self-pity. Properly 
approached he will submit to painful ministrations 
with very little outcry. The proper way to ap- 
proach him is to argue. Direct bribery is of no 
avail. In fact, the mention of nice things he may 
have when he gets well only stirs him to clamor at 
the thought of what he is losing in the immediate 
present. But he will listen to reason, provided 
reason, like other medicaments, is applied with 
infinite patience. He must have time to think 
your proposition over. Given time, he will brace 
himself to his duty. When the episode is over, he 
is irradiated with a glow of self-appreciation 
that cheers us all up. He will compliment Emme- 
line on her surgical skill ; he will remark that he ex- 
pected the operation to be much more complicated 
than he found it to be; he may even offer to have 



182 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

it done all over again, an offer which we receive in 
the spirit in which it is submitted, as an evidence 
of good will rather than as a practical issue. 

In writing of Harold I find myself continually 
returning to the one trait so predominant in the 
boy as almost to constitute, for us, his personality. 
And yet I dare say he is not unlike other children 
in that respect. I refer to his self-contained 
spiritual life, to the secret fountain of his thoughts 
into which he will grant us only a glimpse, and 
that involuntarily. The educational sociologues 
confound hypocrisy with honest reticence when 
they insist that the child shall be a sort of infantile 
George Moore with his heart and whatever else is 
inside him on his sleeve. It is one thing for Harold 
to hold back some confession of misdeeds, to re- 
fuse an answer to a direct question bearing on a 
practical problem of mutual concern. It is quite 
another thing that he does not consider the secret 
processes of his soul as material for general con- 
versation. He has, of course, his periods of gar- 
rulity; at bedtime, for instance, when he will rack 
his brain for topics to postpone the turning down 
of the light and the closed door. On such occa- 
sions when invented matter fails him he will take 
up in desperation some subject that is really close 
to his heart ; but rarely at any other time. 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 183 

It is an error to suppose that children take pleas- 
ure in asking unanswerable questions ; at least 
children of Harold's age. They have delicacy. 
Harold may be insistent in putting questions which 
are difficult simply because the matter is hard to 
explain, but he is aware that there are other topics 
which we do not want to talk about, and these he 
will avoid to spare our susceptibilities, or else ap- 
proach them with circumspection. The mystery 
of death, for instance, is a subject that fascinates 
the mind of every child. But Harold, having en- 
countered extreme reluctance on our part to dis- 
cuss the matter with him, will display the most 
extraordinary ingenuity in bending conversation 
in that direction, always framing his questions so 
as to leave the initiative to us. I am afraid that 
the crabbed piece-meal information we offer him 
gives him a rather contemptuous opinion at times 
of our courage or our intelligence. His own im- 
pressions of the great mystery I suspect are not 
far from the truth, but whenever I try to find out 
he will turn the subject. Partly this is because 
of a general reluctance to frame his creed upon 
demand, but partly also it is his desire to spare us 
the embarrassment of fibbing. 

Harold's economy in putting questions is a 
thing for which I am profoundly grateful. It 



184 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

spares me the hypocrisy of saying, " I don't 
know " on matters of which I do know something 
but consider to be outside the sphere of Harold's 
legitimate concern. It spares me the ignominy 
of inventing cocksure answers on subjects of a 
harmless nature, but on which I am unfortunately 
ignorant. But difficulties will arise. In the field 
of natural history, for example, I think I know 
something of general principles. I think I could 
give a fair account of the difference between Dar- 
winism and Weismanism. I think I know what 
the mutation theory of De Vries means. By re- 
freshing my memory in the encyclopaedia I could 
sum up the Mendelian hypothesis without getting 
more than half the specific facts wrong. But un- 
fortunately Harold is not interested in the dif- 
ference between Darwin and Lamarck, but in the 
difference between an apple tree and a maple. 
There he is better informed than I, and it has 
often been his lot to instruct me. He offers his 
information in gentlemanly fashion, without a 
trace of pedantry. On the whole I think that as 
between the things Harold asks me and the things 
he tells me the balance is in favor of the latter. 

Harold's views upon me are perfectly natural: 
that is, they are extremely complex. I am a be- 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 185 

nevolent power, but not an omnipotent power. I 
am the power that promises circuses and generous 
quantities of confectionery, only to have my cir- 
cuses countermanded and my candy estimates 
radically revised downward by a higher power 
that works for the ultimate best interests of 
Harold ; it is spelled Emmeline. But if the boy is 
thus brought to recognize the limitations on my 
authority, this applies only within the home and 
in matters concerning his own welfare. With re- 
gard to Harold, I am a sort of inferior deity who 
is himself subject to the power of Necessity. But 
outside — in the vague universe included within 
the limits of the Office, to which I depart and from 
which I return like Apollo Helios into and out 
from the sea, except that I set in the morning 
and rise at night — I am to Harold a divinity of the 
first magnitude. It is his general impression that 
I write all the fourteen pages of the newspaper 
for which I am working; that in my outside time 
I write the high-class monthlies ; that I have writ- 
ten the greater part of the books in my library, 
including the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and that 
having written all these books, I have also printed 
them, bound them, and sold them at hundreds of 
dollars a copy. 

Such being his earnest belief with regard to my 



186 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

professional capacities, it is natural that when en- 
gaged in the most ancient children's game in the 
world, namely, the matching of fathers, Harold's 
fancy should give itself free rein. I presume it is 
the rudiments of that sentiment which we later 
describe as patriotism that impels Harold to claim 
for his father superhuman achievements in ath- 
letics and business. At that the boy has his 
limitations of conscience. There was one occasion 
when his friend Herbert asserted that his father 
once took an ordinary bamboo rod and caught a 
whale. It was a comfort to have Harold assume 
a skeptical attitude, and instead of declaring that 
his father once caught a fish as big as the Wool- 
worth Building, content himself with impugning 
his opponent's veracity. Probably Harold's sense 
of humor here enters to apprise him that it is suf- 
ficient to have a father who can throw a baseball 
further than any man alive, lift heavier weights 
than Sandow, and earn $1,000 an hour by writing 
the world's best literature, without claiming for 
him the impossible feat of catching a whale at the 
end of a bamboo pole. 

How does Harold reconcile my character as a 
composite Rockefeller — Brickley — William Dean 
Howells with the fact that when I have promised 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 187 

him a bar of chocolate after supper I have been 
sometimes forced to sit by silently and have my 
decision reversed with costs in an elaborate opin- 
ion by United States Supreme Court Justice Em- 
meline, nobody dissenting? If on such occasions 
the sense of frustrated desire does not embitter 
the boy overmuch, it may be that he will recognize 
my subjection to the above-mentioned law of Ne- 
cessity, to which all must bend. Otherwise I sup- 
pose Harold regards me with a fair measure of 
contempt, possibly mixed with pity. Sometimes 
there is no trace of pity. Sometimes Harold be- 
haves abominably. While Justice Emmeline's 
opinion with regard to the circus or the chocolate 
is being formulated, Harold will lend me a 
sneaking sort of moral support, eying me 
furtively and pulling the longest face at his dis- 
posal without daring to commit himself in words. 
But once the sentence of reversal is pronounced 
Harold knows where his bread is buttered. He 
flops shamefully to the winning side, and in his 
zeal to make his peace with the de facto powers, 
he turns on me in the most shameful manner, de- 
claring that Father is always offering him things 
that are not good for him, that circuses are a bore 
anyhow, and that he would much rather wait till 
to-morrow and have a small bit of chocolate with 



188 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

the assurance that it would do him good instead of 
harm. Yes he would, the traitor ! 

And jet the boy's conduct is natural. When the 
bitterness of his base desertion passes, I am the 
first to acknowledge the justice as well as the 
prudence of his course. I am a good enough imi- 
tation god for Harold's ordinary purposes, a Baal 
for moments of ease and prosperity and guilty 
dalliance. But when adversity falls, and the su- 
preme test comes between Baal and the Jehovah 
of justice and righteous Necessity, he flies instinc- 
tively to the embrace of the Higher Power, which 
is Emmeline. He turns his back with decision on 
the circuses and the chocolates of the Gentiles 
and meekly confesses the authority of one in whose 
hands are the gifts that follow upon a sane wor- 
ship of the Law. Ex tenebris — at midnight, when 
Harold wakes sometimes with sudden pain, or in 
the hush of the sickroom, or in the long twilight 
of convalescence when the passions run low and 
Harold is conscious only of his frail mortality, it 
is not upon me that Harold calls. At such mo- 
ments I am like Baal and Odin and Jupiter 
Olympus when their moment comes. I am dis- 
tinctly de trop. At such moments, with doctors 
and nurses in the house, and an air of general 
ineptitude oppressing me, what can I do but retire 



HAROLD AND THE UNIVERSE 189 

to my own room and try to read Galsworthy in a 
thick Goetterdammerung of tobacco smoke until 
Necessity, snatching a moment from the sickroom, 
insists that I put on my hat and go out for a 
walk? 

As I think back over the random observations 
and memories I have here thrown together I feel 
that this paper demands an honester title than the 
one I set down at the beginning. Of course, 
" Harold and the Universe " is good for catch- 
penny purposes. But " Field Notes on Harold " 
would have been the truer heading. There is little 
here of that fine consecutiveness and subtlety 
which you find in modern theories about the child ; 
but so many of these theories are untrue. There 
is this element of unity in my remarks that they 
are intended to convey an impression of this com- 
plex thing called the Child which is now being re- 
duced to such easy formulas — formulas which in 
the name of a higher freedom for the child 
threaten the true freedom of the child with our 
rough groping invasions into his spontaneous soul 
life. Or else they set up a child of straw, describ- 
ing him as a victim of despotism which is not so, as 
a slave to futile standards which is not so, as a 
neglected, pitiful creature, which is not so. Exag- 



190 BELSHAZZAR COURT 

geration, which lies at the basis of every enthu- 
siasm, has exaggerated out of our common talk 
the old, true notion of the child as an inexhaustible 
source of freedom and happiness, as a being who 
stands in no need of charters of rights and declara- 
tions of independence, because these are rights 
which we cannot alienate, however we try. 

Who am I, to kick against the formula makers? 
In my description of Harold I might easily have 
revealed a greater degree of precise information 
and a firmer grasp on general principles. Harold 
is an enormous investment. He represents a vast 
capitalization of sacrifices, hopes, labors, fears, 
and doubts. And yet if you were to ask me to 
issue a prospectus on Harold, describing how soon 
and just how big the dividends will be on the capi- 
talization, I could not tell you. On the basis of 
the preceding account I should have the greatest 
difficulty in listing Harold on the Stock Exchange, 
not to speak of having him designated as a legal 
investment for savings banks and insurance com- 
panies. Wild-cat speculator that I am, who am 
I to criticise the earnest men and women who 
would establish childhood on the sure basis of 
Standard Oil Subsidiaries and English Consols? 
But on this subject I prefer to be a gambler and 
take a chance. 





O ■'^'riTr^* Cp 1°®^^''^,'''®'^ "Sing the Bookkeeper process. O 
-* '^ " >i- Neutralizing Agent: Magnesium Oxide ^ 

> Trfiatmont riotQ- 

MAY 1993 (•- 
BBKKEEPER ^: 

PRESERVATION TFrHMDi nriicQ in ~ * 











x-^^^. 



.0 



^^ '^^. ■ -v >^ % •'y/%\>*^.* 4.^ 




r^ 



o 



-\' 









x^-;^ 






< ^ s • • / O 



.-^ 



-ir 



f^ 









-f 



o 



*' 



<* 










.0 







^^-v 



(#117 «o, "-f 



•>.Va;'^. ^^^^^^ 



>ouso^; c, 









